Death of the Computer Magazines

Here's an interesting one from reader Bill Jackson:

"Any magazine has a two-three month lead time before any advertised item is seen by the target audience. In that period prices and products change to make many ads a waste of time and money.

Massively parallel web based advertising, through a sea of news/review sites like the uinquirer/Toms/Anand/Rughister/etc get the product news to the target audience in the blink of an eye.

Frankly I am amazed that the print mags have endured for so long as they steadily lose readers and adverts. I used to buy them all the time....I have not bought a computer mag in over a year, yet I have missed little, if anything, of import in the computer world.

Of course I am a very web conscious person and many are not, so the mag audience declines at a steady pace and the mags fight for the shrinking number of eyeballs.

If you exit computers and go to womens' products, well the scene is a bit better for the mags. Few women are as web literate as you [Wendy Grossman] are, but that number grows, even as it lags the mens' numbers, so the same forces will hammer all magazines, albeit differently per magazine per type.

So you can make a graph of magazine type versus percentage web eyes and paper eyes. Computer mags have lost the most to the web, with all the rest having various degrees of loss of paper eyes. Sites such as these, Tabonline and AccessABC will track this data and might be of interest, however I am sure you are aware of similar sources. I am not a member of the site, however I am sure you or the uinquirer have access to this data.

The magazines also see this data, and in it they see their doom, unless they adapt. The problem is there seems to be no place to go but down for them in the advert driven world of the future unless they become totally like Tom's [Hardware Site], or Anandtech and cut their ties to the paper based products and let the paper fade away, managing each eyeball segment as a market in decline over time. Each group of eyeballs will have a different rate of departure from paper to the web. Womens' eyeballs and seniors' eyeballs will probably be the slowest to decline, but they will all decline and in 10 years the magazine market will be a lot different to now.

Ziff...gone? or will it adapt in time? I doubt that many of the old line printing empires will endure, especially in Europe, since they are so full of old cronies and protected worker groups and they will find it impossible to lay off the senior bosses or workers and they will die the dinosaur's death of a million bites from their new web based competitors.

The only survival strategy is to start new web based entities and hope they will endure...the problem is the old boy network will try to make sure they fail, either by micromanaging them in old tech or starving them of capital and new staff.

That means release of papereyed talent and hiring of webeyed talent (unless they can be trained anew for the web). A lot fewer talents will be needed as so much material arrives as a finished linkable page from the review/manufacturers web sites. A lot less paper will be used, many more printing presses will run no more, and commercial product cycles will get even more compressed since a new killer product can emerge and cover the eyeball earth in a day or two and away go all the orders for the old killed product.