What is the future of trade magazines?

I think trade mags in print will suffer unless they make strong efforts to take their brand to the web effectively.

Social Media, articles nuggets linked to longer, more in-depth analysis, and Social Networking and connecting will play a large part in how people keep up with their industries in the future – and one can’t do most of that in print.

However, having said that, there’s still a lot of people who are not web or tech Luddites that still like to read print – including myself. I hate staring at a screen all day and like to linger of a good read in the park on a sunny day.. or at home after dinner on my favourite chair… which is not computer-view friendly.

The future leaders of the trade magazine industry will be those in print who make a shift to online that embraces and encompasses developing trends in social media or, my feeling is, it will be those who come from the web to print.

And they will do it a lot differently.

With viable ondemand printing for magazines (http://magcloud.com/ , http://www.lulu.com , www.createspace.com etc) on the horizon, a huge slice of risk has virtually been eliminated for those that want to bridge to print from the web.

Magazines can be created from web content, packaged, pdf’ed then uploaded to an ondemand service which handles subscriptions, prints the magazines and ships on per order level. The online publication collects a royalty above the ondemand costs. At Magcloud you might mark up 2 euro per issue on their cost and it rounds off to 6-8 euro for the client. Or more.. or less if you want. Then there’s advertising revenue to be added from existing web ad clients.

One step further has technology such as the http://www.ondemandbooks.com/home.htm Expresso Book Machine printing up a copy of a book or magazine while you wait at the bookstore, the local library or your favourite coffeeshop.

Then there’s Kindle to be considered.

The future is offering a lot of unique alternatives to the old models we have lived with for a long, long time.

I am currently building a web B2B industry magazine that plans to segue to print eventually – and do it quite differently than the industry is doing it today.

Richard

www.expathos.com

Tags: b2b, computer view, future, industry, luddites, machine printing, magazine, networking, ondemand, print, trade magazines, trade mags, web magazines
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