Business titles neglect the Web
You'd have thought that with their content, relationships with advertisers and sophisticated databases, business magazine publishers would be in the vanguard of business information - indeed, e-commerce. Not so. Most trade magazine publishers' sites are either adjuncts to or promotional vehicles for their magazines, with not much that users can't get either in the magazines or elsewhere on the Internet.
The reason for this is that culturally, structurally and operationally many business publishers aren't geared up for Web publishing. In particular:
1 - Some senior managers and industry figures still aren't convinced about the Internet. This year's Periodical Publishers' Association conference - despite some excellent papers on the electronic revolution - had the slogan 'Magazines: Driving the Next Decade'. Really?
2 - There's still a tendency, particularly in editorial, to see the Web product as marginal to or competitive with the magazine;
3 - Magazines' operating systems are basically a batch manufacturing process, whereas a Web site's system structure is that of a service: the user comes to it, not the other way round;
4 - Internet users want speed, flexibility and responsiveness. Magazine operations are geared to delivering quality and dependability at regular intervals. The skills needed to deliver the former aren't always easy to adopt by people trained in the latter;
5 - The revenue models of magazines don't work well on the Web. Display advertising's equivalent, banners, can't deliver the same revenue volumes. Recruitment advertising tends to be offered to advertisers using the paper product at lower rates, or even free, on the Web;
6 - Lack of central R&D funding means many sites are starved by an inability to create revenue, because staff are stretched working on both site magazine.
Despite this, there are good sites around. Miller Freeman's Dotmusic, Reed's Estates Gazette Interactive and a handful of other products are cause for hope. So what characterises these sites?
First, they were developed as (or soon became) products in their own right. They create new audiences outside the core magazine readership and take full advantage of the advantages the Internet has over paper. They also have dedicated staff and senior management support.
Traditional business magazine publishers have the chance to use the Web to develop and sell more types of content, and to create channels for advertisers to do business with customers. But to succeed in this, they not only have to believe they can and should do it, but overhaul their structures and culture to make it really happen.
Ian Pring is an independent online marketing consultant.
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