Everything is moving towards "online" ... or is it?
03/11/2023
The world is full of contradictions, or so it seems. One day you can read that large publishing houses are moving towards an online-only strategy with their "newspapers" with a strong audience, while the next day you can find new magazines and special editions from well-known publishing houses on newsstands.
Print/paper is dead, one reads everywhere and yet new magazines are still being created, printed and probably also read. Especially in smaller niches, this still seems to work, even if establishing a new magazine requires a lot of enthusiasm and a long puff. But that's how it is when you want to enrich the world with a new sports car brand and yet there are always people who do just that, even though most of them fail.
A car manufacturer was once asked how to become a millionaire. The answer: you start with a billion, build a sports car and try to market it ...
The risks are certainly not as high with magazines, but even in this business it is difficult to make money, especially as constantly rising printing costs and dwindling advertising revenues can hardly be passed on to subscribers, if there are any at all.
So, full steam ahead towards online? This is not easy either. The online world is much more fragmented and therefore much more complex. In addition, there is a surprisingly high resistance to online payment offers. Even we at Zwischengas have already been accused of blackmail, because recently a fee (from EUR/CHF 4.10 per month) has been required to read a premium article. For too long, almost everything online was free and a pure marketing story. But it's hard to make a living from free offers and what Google and the like pay for advertising is only worthwhile for the biggest players in the industry.
We will soon be asking a "question of the week" on this topic to see whether the world is really changing in our environment.
