Author: Mark Fletcher

Magazine publishers are building extraordinary online traffic for established print brands.

Last year the Magazine Publishers of America published the Top 10 Websites Associated with Magazine Brands as collated by the Media Industry Newsletter. The growth experienced by some of these magazine websites is extraordinary. Take Vanity Fair – pageviews up 64% November 2006 over October 2006; unique visitors up by 65%. That’s extraordinary growth. Other magazines are experiencing similar: Premiere; Popular Science; Time; In Style; Men’s Health.

What’s interesting yet not unexpected is that many of the titles experiencing extraordinary growth in online traffic are experiencing flat or falling sales over the retail counter. Take Popular Science: 1,055,038 unique visitors. Great online growth while at retail the science category in retail is falling – down more than 10% in 2006.

Magazines are not dead. Many titles are using their online presence to stay in touch with readers as well as attract people new to the brand. Some categories are fading and the retailer challenge is to balance real-estate up to reflect this.

The launch of Windows Vista is not as well supported by magazine publishers as previous Microsoft Windows upgrades.

As of today, Australian newsstands have one dedicated Windows Vista title plus APC and PC Authority with good Windows Vista coverage.

This lack of Vista product may be sue to delays in local distribution of overseas titles or due to the decline in the computer title category in favor of accessing more timely information online. If Vista rolls out like iTunes titles, we will have three or four in the next few months – too late to capitalize on the considerable interest today.

UK newsagency Baxters has launched a website selling magazines. Onlinenewsagent focuses on selling single copies – offering same day shipping of over 3,000 titles. They even have some Australian titles available.

Newsagents across the country have setup feature displays for the latest issue of Ralph magazine as part of their commitment to in store promotions. Our display has offended some customers. If any more complain we’ll take it down. While we need to promote the diverse range of titles we carry, there is no point in getting our most regular and valuable customers, women 35 and older, offside. Part of the problem for us is that our feature display areas are right next to our women’s magazine area.

I was talking to the owner of a petrol outlet and asked why they don’t do displays like this. His answer was blunt: what and upset half my customers? No way. I suspect that the newsagent displays will hel;p boost sales in these non compliant petrol outlets.

I want to promote Ralph and other men’s titles – I’ll find a better wan to do this without our core customers.

As part of the magazine shuffle I blogged about yesterday was the move of Notebook and Real Living from the interiors area to the high traffic women’s area. These are hard titles to locate. Their covers suggest interiors but inside they cover a broad area. They are like several other new and refreshed titles which cross segments and make placement challenging.

We’re not sure that this is the right location – only time and data will tell us if the move is right. The challenge is where do they belong if not here?

Sales of health magazines are booming, growing more than 10% in 2006 compared to overall magazine category growth of just under 4%.

Responding to this growth and the opportunity of several new titles, we have broken with traditional newsagent magazine layout thinking and moved the Health category to better real-estate.

Our health titles used to be wedged between wedding and children’s titles. Now they are located near the top of our busiest magazine aisle and next to the popular food section. The move helped us address a location dilemma – the placement of food titles which focus on health such as the Better Homes Diabetic Living.

A side benefit of the move is people finding new titles when they get to an area their favorite titles used to be. Given the frequency of customer visits many become store blind so changes in magazine locations can boost sales.

Newsagents tend to see magazines as set and forget products. In some respects, with 1,300+ titles in stock, moving categories can be too daunting to contemplate. Our simple move took two hours of researching and planning and another hour and a half to execute. It was like playing a puzzle game, moving block by block and sometimes going backward until the goal was achieved.

The move is less than a week old so it is too early to assess any impact. We’ll measure carefully and adjust as guided by sales data.

This display by Jane and the team at our shop is drawing good interest from people looking for a keepsake tribute to Steve Irwin.

We will use this opportunity to remind people of his Wildlife Warriors legacy and how people can support their work.

I’m often critical of one off titles but not this time. This tribute is timely and connects well with the community.

NDD is the worst magazine distributor from a newsagent cash flow perspective according to the 2006 magazine sell through rate data I have sitting on my desk. I’ve been trawling through this data from many newsagencies seeking a fair and accurate subset to share with the Australian Newsagents Federation for use in their representations to government and for another project within my software company. Across the board in 2006, NDD magazine sell through rates were lower than those for Network and Gotch. This means that NDD is tying up more newsagent cash as a percentage of its total newsagent billings than any other company.

In most newsagencies I have data for, the NDD sell through rate is below 50% for the whole year across all categories. This is unacceptable for a company with exceptional IT systems and a wealth of sales data from newsagents which can guide it to provide more equitable scale out to newsagents.

NDD clearly does not respect the newsagent channel otherwise it’s sell through rate average would be significantly better.

To the NDD folk reading this and angry at what you will again claim is my ‘bashing’ of NDD. Treat newsagents with commercial respect and you won’t be embarrassed by the harm you are doing to the small business newsagency channel.

News Limited used the Media pages of The Australian today to explain the change in cover strategy for Alpha magazine I blogged about last month.

Feedback across the counter about Alpha over the last year has been that the blokes like how it’s a sports magazine and looks like a sports magazine. Breasts will get in the way of that feeling.