Wall Street Journal

Cosmopolitan readers can get their first year’s subscription to the print magazine for $10. But if they want the digital edition on their iPads, they will have to fork over $19.99. That’s a pricing maneuver so bold it may make even Cosmo readers blush. In the book and newspaper industries, digital versions are typically cheaper than print ones. But some in the magazine world are going the other way, charging more for their digital versions.

Buffeted by declining advertising, which accounted for about 75% of their revenue historically, magazines are turning to tablet computers and digital editions to boost circulation revenue. In doing so, they are hoping to reset decades of subscription discounting so deep that a year’s supply of magazines like Esquire currently costs just $8.

“This represents an opportunity for the magazine business to become more leveraged toward consumer revenue and a little less dependent on advertising,” said David Carey, the president of Cosmo publisher Hearst Magazines, in an interview at his office at the top of New York’s Hearst Tower. Nearby, in Hearst’s tablet-filled App Lab, John Loughlin, Hearst’s executive vice president and general manager, put it even more bluntly: “I hope that this is the demise of $6 and $7 and $8 and $9 print subscriptions,” he said.

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The Wall

With half a billion Twitter accounts, over 1 billion Facebook accounts and an estimated 200m more online users across the world by end 2013, social media is changing the way media brands connect and engage with their audience. Over the past four weeks, we’ve interviewed experts across all media channels – TV, radio, magazines, newspapers – and asked about the challenges they’ve faced from social media, the lessons they’ve learnt and their preparation for 2013.

From this audit with heads of social media, communications experts and business leaders, along with our own experiences working with UK and international media owners, we’ve put together a series of observations and insights, identifying clear trends for social media use by media brands in 2013:

http://bit.ly/TWHYvN

Folio

More than 40 percent of magazines surveyed saw concurrent print and digital audience growth in the fall of 2012, according to the most recent study by GfK MRI.

Of the 118 titles reported to have experienced print growth from the spring of this year, 78 of them, or 43 percent, also saw digital audience gains. On the digital-only side, 119 publications had their audiences rise, including 25 with previous digital audiences of less than 1,000. Overall, average total print audience rose by 1.3 percent, while average total digital audience increased by 47.5 percent.

Six magazines-Handy, Street Rodder, Outside, Four Wheeler, Conde Nast Traveler and Diabetes Self-Management-reached benchmarks of double-digit print growth and triple-digit digital growth. Despite an acquisition by Buzzmedia and a promise to focus more on the digital product, the largest print audience increase was seen by Spin (35.91 percent). Mother Earth News (25.68), Diabetic Cooking (18.40), Country Sampler (18.34) and Yankee (18.12) were the other top gainers. Conversely, Teen Vogue (-17.73), PC World (-14.49), Elle (-10.38), American Hunter (-10.03) and Esquire (-9.98) suffered the biggest drop-offs.

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IDG Global Solutions 

The use of mobile devices has soared in the past two years. To measure just how important mobile is, IDG Global Solutions surveyed more than 21, 000 IT, business, and consumer users worldwide. Learn about content consumption, popular applications, and device preferences.Download the white paper

[CLICK TO ENLARGE]

Marketing Charts

When it comes to the advertising medium they find most influential in making a purchase decision, American adults are far more likely to point to TV (37.2%) than any other, including newspapers (10.6%), the internet (5.6%), and magazines (4.4%), per results from a TVB study released in June 2012. This result aligns with April research from ExactTarget, which analyzed the attitudes of online consumers to various advertising media, finding 53% reporting that a TV ad had influenced them to purchase a product or service in the past 12 months, a far larger proportion than could say the same about newspaper ads (32%) and magazine ads (30%).

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NY Times

Time Inc., once the magazine industry’s most ardent opponent of selling subscriptions through Apple, will make all of its magazines available via Apple’s newsstand, the two companies said Wednesday. Laura Lang, Time Inc.’s chief executive, and Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president for Internet software and services, said in a phone interview that they had reached an agreement that would allow readers to subscribe to 20 Time Inc. magazines, including People, Sports Illustrated, InStyle and Entertainment Weekly, through the newsstand section of Apple’s App Store.

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eMedia Vitals 

Google has been a traffic bellwether for more than a decade, enabling those who embraced search engine optimization (SEO) to disrupt those who didn’t. Now, Google seems to be turning on SEO in favor of social media optimization (SMO), launching several initiatives that directly disrupt those who have been able to game their algorithm. Sites like Huffington Post and Gawker, who recognize this sea change, stand to benefit greatly from Google’s moves while content farms like Demand Media, Associated Content and even hybrid sites like About.com are already suffering. Where do magazine and newspaper sites fit in the spectrum of winners and losers? We’ll look at today’s winners and losers later in this post.

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TechCrunch 

It’s no secret that most of us put more stock in the recommendations we get from friends than traditional forms of advertising. What’s interesting, though, is that while most consumers also increasingly trust online reviews and ads, trust in paid advertising on television, magazines and newspapers has declined pretty rapidly. Thelatest data from Nielsen’s Global Trust in Advertising Survey shows just how dramatic this decline is: while 92% of consumers say they trust word-of-mouth recommendations, less than half trust paid ads in traditional media outlets. The trust in these ads has declined by more than 20% since 2009.

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EMarketer forecasts online advertising will edge out print in total spending this year. While it says online dollars have already outstripped newspapers and magazines separately, today’s announcement by the New York-based researcher marks the first time digital is projected to surpass the two combined.

Continue reading… 

Media auditor BPA Worldwide approved a number of new and amended rules during its December 2011 meeting in New York City, including several that address the increasing difficulty of measuring a magazine’s digital audience.

Reporting app usage, specifically, has been a challenge, increasingly so as the format is moving toward “push,” rather than email, notification of a new issue’s delivery, for which there is no mechanism for tracking successful delivery.

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