Digital Magazine Company Buys Print
This won’t get the kind of coverage of an AOL buying Time-Warner, or Yahoo looking to gobble Disney, but I think it’s a small modern example of online buying out meat-space media. Zinio, an expert in, basically, transferring magazines to the Web, has “purchased” online subscription company BlueDolphin . (They call it a merger, but PaidContent, where I contribute and which usually gets it right, says Zinio bought its new partner.)
The magazine industry has moved online in fits and starts, and there are myriad models, from fully free, like Forbes, to nearly fully paid, like many of the Time-Warner titles, to the formerly paid but now mostly free, like Business Week, to the barely online, like Vogue or Vitals , which I used to handle on the Web.
Meanwhile, print magazine companies feel they’re in trouble as they grapple with the new technologies. I find it instructive that the Web technology company would be able to buy the print circulation sales company.
For the record, Texterity and qmags are others who convert magazines to Web distributed formulae.