The Press Gazette this week has an excellent roundup on the ABC figures for the UK magazine industry in the second half of 2024. The headline is depressing “half of print titles see distribution drop 10% or more” and yet not surprising. Not surprising, since we have known for years, that print circulations and especially print subscriptions are generally on a downward trend. However, a 10% year on year fall, is concerning.
Sure, there are some good growth stories on the digital front, but the digital good news audited by ABC is unlikely to be compensatory in cash terms. The full price of print subs is noted in the audit, with zero information on the quantum of revenues from digital. We do know that most of the digital growth is coming from All You Can Read deals (AYCR), mostly from Apple News+, also some from Readly. These services offer paid subscribers access to large collections of magazines and newspapers and are proving popular with consumers. The detailed Auditing (from ABC) which underlies the Press Gazette reports offers a wealth of information on the print and publishing strategies of the magazines surveyed. See for example the ABC certificates for two strong titles in the fashion category: Vogue and Grazia, both titles finding some growth from AYCR circulation.
For some interesting analysis of the data behind this impressive auditing, recorded by ABC and summarised by the Press Gazette, we refer to this week’s Flashes & Flames (subscriber only — it’s worth it) where Colin Morrison offers helpful explanation of the numbers behind the success of Apple News+ and some words of warning about the long term implications of AYCR deals for magazines. Morrison notes that the service “is generating big money…..(perhaps) more than $3bn in 2024. Apple shares 50% of its subscription revenue with publishers based on how much time readers spend on their content”. Also, that publishers are increasingly keen to sign on to the service, so a queue is growing, but in Morrison’s view the long term problem is that publishers are participating in a subscription service where Apple owns the customers and the long term goal is to build the Apple service (perhaps with bespoke Apple-owned content or low-priced verticals). He suggests that the “real challenge is to maximise the scale of the Apple windfall — while re-investing in the “real” subscriptions vital for the future…..Legacy media companies again find themselves torn between their own short-term pressures and the remorseless long-term strategies of digital platforms which, ultimately, will have all the leverage.”
There are bound to be negative aspects of any All You Can Read model of aggregated content: one is the publisher is at best very indirectly linked to the subscriber, as noted by Morrison. A second is that the service may become too successful as a smorgasbord of everything in which individual brands are lost. Third, the publisher and the consumer may begin to wonder whether any publication is really being read at all, since too much is being sampled and perhaps some of the content is dregs supplied for clicks, or even synthesised for a content stream which screws up the auditing. Perhaps it is time to invest in Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, a book which has plenty to say about the perils of aggregation. And could have been subtitled “Hard and harsh lessons for musicians, publishers and creatives from Spotify”.
Aggregation may not work well for magazines with strong audience niches and distinctive brands. Publishers of such magazine might also take a look at the way that aggregation strategies are hitting resistance in one of the key digital markest for high-end consumer and professional magazines: library databases. Libraries are a familiar route to aggregation, but digital libraries want depth and persistence as well as breadth. As it happens, this week we saw alarm and resistance from libraries and universities to a new policy announced by Clarivate and its major library aggregations service ProQuest. Clarivate will “now phase out one-time perpetual purchases of digital collections, print and digital books for libraries”. Many librarians and teachers do not like this: a collective response from SCONUL notes: “Perpetual Access… is a cornerstone of libraries’ mission to provide long-term, reliable access to knowledge”.
Exact Editions is moving in the opposite direction to Clarivate. We think that many magazines have a good digital library market and should be made available for the long term to universities, libraries and researchers in specialist fields where a premium price for the archive is guaranteed. For magazines where the archive will grow in value, it is time to join the Exact Editions route to Perpetual and Ongoing Access. Read the white paper available here.
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