MediaFlect

Was over at the Digital Magazine Forum in New York yesterday, covering it for PaidContent.org, and Corante’s Rebuilding Media, where I’ll post today.

I think the B2B magazines are getting it, figuring out how to take an exisitng product and move it online, perhaps enhanced (Women’s Wear Daily - full disclosure: I helped relaunch their Web site), or sell info in newly envigorated ways (McGraw Hill Construction), or create Web sites that make plenty of money, especially in the tech space (PC World). But I fear for the consumer mags.

Don’t misunderstand. I have infinite admiration for how people at places like Conde Nast and Meredith and Rodale can make their publications such successes, selling millions in print and getting advertisers to pay big amounts to reach those audiences. But folks even at those companies acknowledge how much of a crap shoot it can be — witness the number of magazines that launch, then fold, every year, even at those companies (Vitals and Suede come to mind, and Mr. Magazine can give you plenty more).

At the same time, if they’re thinking of the Web in terms of purely selling print subscriptions, and overly worried about protecting print rather than getting as much from digital media as possible, they’re ultimately protecting a flank when their frontline troops are facing a juggernaut.

Newspapers have seen their classified ad revenue decline some $2 billion since jobs and cars and other classified sites came along, and Web sites are now getting traction in the kinds of mainstream consumer ads the magazines survive on. Eventually those products’ marketers, too, will start to demand the kinds of performance and metrics and reach and frequency and leads the Web can provide, rather than relying on ad exec promises of GRP. Those who have the right audience in the digital sphere, and can get the message of marketers out to them, will be in a better position to survive.