|
Small biz magazines
As dot.coms crash, focus shifts to entrepreneurs
By Jeff Bercovici
How much things change in a year.
It was only last year at this time that New Economy magazines were all the rage. In the halcyon days of the permanent-growth economy, everyone was eager to be the next ad-stuffed Industry Standard or Red Herring.
That was before the technology market performed its spectacular belly flop. Nowadays, the very idea of publishing a biz-tech magazine is faintly embarrassing.
Not surprisingly, with the economy heading south, magazine publishers are thinking small, concentrating on a market that doesn’t live or die at the whims of the Nasdaq.
Powerhouses including McGraw-Hill, Time Inc. and Gruner + Jahr are all cranking up their small business magazines, gearing up for what’s looking to be the next hot showdown in the business category.
"I believe the dot.com explosion really created a new culture of entrepreneurs," says Keith Fox, senior vice president of marketing and business development for BusinessWeek.
"Clearly we’re seeing a trend from a trade perspective towards the consolidation of focus on small business. You will see a heated-up fight."
This week, BusinessWeek relaunches its five-year-old monthly small business supplement, which goes out to 225,000 subscribers who work in companies with fewer than 100 employees. Previously called Frontier, the magazine has been renamed BusinessWeek SmallBiz and redesigned with a new logo and enhanced photography and graphics.
"We wanted to speak to younger, more aggressive entrepreneurs," says Fox, citing a statistic that small businesses represent 99.7 percent of all employers. The name change, he says, is intended to align SmallBiz more closely with the brand equity of BusinessWeek and its tech-oriented offshoot, eBiz, he says.
The small-business supplement has been successful in tapping a new advertising base, says Fox, noting that, while there is a certain amount of spillover from the parent title, 80 percent of SmallBiz’s advertisers come in to the supplement without having first run in BusinessWeek.
Ad pages in Frontier were up 30 percent in 2000 versus the previous year, and ad revenue was up 40 percent, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. Numbers for this year weren’t available, but a spokeswoman says ad volume is down so far versus the beginning of last year in keeping with the trend seen by other business magazines. BusinessWeek itself is down 30.5 percent in ad pages through the first two months of the year, according to PIB.
But SmallBiz isn’t the only title ramping up.
Time Inc.’s Fortune Small Business recently introduced a redesign including a new logo, heavier paper, a number of new editorial sections and a switch to perfect-bound format.
The magazine, which goes from eight to 10 times a year this year, changed its name from Your Company in November of 1999. Last year, it began experimenting with a limited amount of paid newsstand and subscription circulation to go along with its core of one million American Express small business cardholders.
Ad pages in FSB, after being up 58 percent in 2000, are off 31.3 percent through February, according to PIB, with ad revenue down 27.1 percent, to $3.4 million.
Gruner & Jahr USA is also angling for a bigger share of the small business market. Last summer, the company bought 650,000-circulation Inc. magazine. Last month, G+J announced it had hired Lee Jones, longtime publisher of Entrepreneur magazine, from Ziff-Davis, where he was running Smart Business, to take over as publisher of Inc. Steve Thompson, former publisher of The Industry Standard, also joined G+J, where he will be in charge of creating packages for Inc. and Fast Company.
Ad pages in Inc. are down 13.4 percent through February, and revenue is off 8.9 percent, to $9.8 million, according to PIB.
At Entrepreneur, the oldest of the small-biz magazines, ad pages were up 1.9 percent through February, but revenue was down 15.9 percent to $8.1 million. Entrepreneur's total paid circulation was up 2.9 percent to 543,177 in the second half of last year, but newsstand sales were off 18.2 percent to 40,274, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
- Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
Send to a
Friend| Printer-Friendly Version
Cover Page | Contact
Us
© 2001 Media Life
