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of tears for trades
Ad pages tumble as internet steals away readers
By Jeff Bercovici
Media people understand how rough the past several years have been on consumer magazines. What's less appreciated is how badly trade publications have suffered.
Perhaps even less appreciated is that the hurt will continue long after consumer titles recover and that trade publishing may well never come back, at least in its current form.
Blame the internet. The irony is that the web, while initially feared by consumer publishers, has proven to be an able companion to their print products.
Not so for trade publications, which initially had seen the web as a companion. The internet stops nothing short of threatening the very existence of trades, in its timeliness making obsolete much of the editorial of traditional weeklies and monthlies.
Many advertisers have already pulled out of their trade publications, and they will be followed by many more. Far fewer will ever return.
Ad pages for b2b publications fell 30 percent from 2000 to 2002, according to the Business Information Network. In comparison, consumer magazine pages were down 21 percent over the same period, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.
So far this year, consumer magazines are up 3 percent in pages, while trade titles are down another 5 percent.
Since July 2001, 150 trade titles with membership in the Business of Performing Audits have shut down, and another 19 have merged. (The organization has recorded 120 launches over the same span.) Meanwhile, hundreds more trade magazines have cut staff in the face of budget cutbacks.
Hundreds more will fold before an ad turnaround, which is not expected for at least another four years.
Many others will end their print publications and go web-only. While that may seem a continuation of sorts, with the brand intact, the reality is that they will survive in name only. Online publishing is a very different business, with different cost structures and potential revenue streams. How many trade publications will make the transition is hard to guess, but it would seem that few would have the necessary moxie.
Among other challenges, those publishers will have to persuade advertisers, after years of extolling the virtues of print, that they have seen the light and that the real light is in fact the internet.
But perhaps a bigger concern is that by the time they do make the conversion, the space will be crowded with web-only competitors that have already made a convincing case to advertisers.
The numbers for that case are already out there, meticulously gathered by such consumer business sites as Forbes.com and The Wall Street Journal Online. They show the depth of the internet's penetration of the workplace but more important, the increased reliance on the internet by exactly the sorts of C-level executives that traditional print trades target.
These are among the heaviest users of the internet, and more and more of these top executives are giving up their print titles entirely, consumer and trade.
“I don’t think we will come back to the 2000 level until probably ’07, maybe ’06,” says Gordon Hughes, president and CEO of American Business Media, an industry association for b2b publishers.
His prediction tallies with that of Veronis Suhler Stevenson, which projects that advertising growth for b2b magazines will trail GDP growth over the next five years, while consumer magazines will grow faster than GDP.
In addition to the internet, there are other factors causing the decline in trade advertising, and one has been the massive consolidation across a range of industries, says consultant Martin Walker of Walker Communications.
Consolidation within industries reduces the need of the larger survivors to advertise.
“There are fewer advertisers out there and fewer pages to begin with in lots of sectors,” says Walker.
It’s also a reflection of the rapid pace at which trade magazines proliferated during the late-1990s boom, says consultant Steve Rosenfield of Media Resource Group.
“You had markets where there might be five or six publications serving a similar executive,” says Rosenfield. “Whether you’re the butcher magazine or the real estate magazine or whatever it is, there was more and more competition, which created less and less differentiation.”
“We had reached a point as an industry where there was a plethora of books in categories that didn’t really need them,” agrees Hughes. As the economy cooled, advertisers who had been running in every book in a category cut their spending back to the top two or three.
“I think it’s safe to say that we’re going through what I would call a Darwinian period,” says Hughes.
But the major force hurting the trades is still the internet.
“The information is available to those executives on the internet, so the amount of time they spend with b2b publications is, I suspect, lower,” says Rosenfield. “Nobody’s sitting around waiting till they get to their office Monday morning to read the weekly journal anymore.”
One very large print trade that is attempting to convert to the internet is Internet World. The title has suspended publication of its print edition as of the June issue.
With a circulation that at one point reached 225,000 -- quite large by the standards of trade publishing -- Internet World was just too expensive to print and distribute without growth in its ad business, says David Blansfield, group publisher of Penton's Business Technology Group.
“I would suspect that this is something that you might see continuing for larger-circulation publications if this downturn continues,” says Blansfield. “I think you’ll see a lot of people who’ve been taking losses for a couple years now make similar decisions.”
June 2, 2003© 2003 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
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