Last week I posted an ode to Surfer Magazine joining a long list of casualties in the surf media wars. To be a bit more transparent...and verbose... the plight of print media isn't restricted to surf magazines. We all know that. Here in NZ, German mega publishing house Bauer used Covid as their excuse to bail on all their Kiwi titles and employees.
Magazines, regardless of what topic they cover, are in struggle street. Print cannot compete with the immediacy of the interweb. What it can do is provide the full and carefully curated backstory. Sadly many publishers and their bean counters still try to fit the 'modern' formula to magazines. One that isn't working.
That formula goes something like this; 33,33,33.
33% of the revenue comes from advertising. 33% from subscriptions, these are the gold as they are prepaid and vertical sales. 33% from bookshelf sales, these are messy, often sale on return and both distributors and retailers have a cut.
There are exceptions and oddities to this. As an example; a well loved NZ tramping magazine has a huge readership and huge subscriber base. The income from the subscribers has eclipsed advertising revenue since it started. The reason; the age group it satisfies is older [Boomers] and they tend to be more organised and happy to pay in advance for home delivery.
Your costs are; staff, printing [and that's a big one] distribution and then contributors. So then the bean counters' come in and say, well advertising is easy money, the other two sources are hard costly yards... Mr Publisher put your efforts into going after the low hanging fruit. Further to that why are you paying so many subcontractors, ie contributors? I thought you said you employed the best editors?
Add to this another formula, the editorial and advertising mix. This is a balance of the most advertisements the Publisher perceives they can get away with to editorial content. And Surfer magazine was terrible at this [or from a Publisher's POV, great!]. In the 90's and early 2000's the scales were well tipped over 50/50. Generally 60% editorial and 40% advertising feels about right for a reader.
Surfing Magazines do...or did, fall into a unique category. Often the adverts had the best images in them. So the readers were stoking out as much on the latest Search or Reef advert. In fact, as a surf magazine editor I endured many an Ad Agency meeting where I had to repeatedly explain our advert culture. A simple brand logo in the bottom corner of a double page spread action photo. The logo aligned the brand with that personality and talent. Matt Archibald was bad ass... MCD boardies were hardcore, you were hardcore if you wore them too. Simple. Ad Agencies rarely got it.
In the late 90's the surf industry went rad, and that's been well documented. It meant surf mags blew out the thirds formula. It was insidious. The industry spent more and more money on advertising, surf mags and their publishers lapped it up. Not even eventually, quite rapidly revenue was heavily tilted to advertising.
And this is when the criticism that surf mags are just mouth pieces for the industry. The slight had been long levelled at mags, but became louder and louder. In culture where the adverts are prized as much as the editorial content it's hard for anyone to distinguish.
Another thing happened. Publishers got used to the revenue formula being that tilted. They started thinking the advertisers where their core clients, not their readers. They also stopped chasing subscribers and bookshelf sales.
A good editor knows they are there for the reader... that's their job, stoke out and entertain the reader. BUT the editors' boss, the publisher, were now used to the easy money.
Readers of surf mags, the hardcore, were also the same that became disenchanted with the bloated surf industry. They didn't want to wear an Australian branded T'shirt made in the same third world sweat shop as Nike. The hardcore are not dumb. The surf mags that have died the fastest are in fact the very same that tried to hold on to keeping the industry happy.
Surf mag employees are not dumb either. They are core surfers first, that got the chance to document the culture they love. But more often than not got caught between the devil [a non surfing publisher] and the deep blue sea.
I get asked a lot what do surf magazines need to do to survive. Firstly, I'm an optimist, I think there is still a place for surf print, and specifically mags. My go to is 'change the formula man' and behind that statement lies all the above. There's no silver bullet, but there are a bunch of lessons from the past.
When magazines where invented in the 1800's they did not have advertising in them at all. They relied soley on their subscribers to pay for the printing, wages and contributions.
The thirds formula was only a temporary guideline that clearly isn't working anymore... and in fact it got super distorted during the surf industry boom, that's long since burst.
Surf mags got so massive and profitable that corporate Publishers swept in and bought them up. Just about all those titles that got sold off are the ones that are gone. The ones that are left are owned by Publishers that are surfers and understand the cultural shifts in tide.
From the Bookstore
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