Finding new revenue sources can seem daunting for today's magazine publisher, but Andrew Bolwell, the general manager of Hewlett-Packard’s MagCloud, thinks printing on demand has a lot of potential for the industry.
MagCloud prints magazines on demand worldwide that have been uploaded as PDFs to magcloud.com. Invented in HP Labs, the MagCloud web service launched in February and has seen magazines uploaded by a wide variety of publishers, including traditional magazine companies, magazines made by people with very specific passions, literary/art journals, and well known photographers, bloggers and artists to help them connect them to their fans.
THE BIG Q: How Can Printing On Demand Bring Revenue to a Traditional Magazine Publisher?
The publishing industry is obviously going through some fundamental changes. In the past, you would print as many magazines as possible and the ones with the highest circulation numbers would attract the most ad dollars. Fast forward to the present: The Internet has changed that so there is a lot more immediate competition for consumers’ attention and advertisers are much more selective about who they want their messages to reach.
But people love magazines. And they still love to read something in print. It’s still not clear how much consumers trust information that is in the digital format, but we know they trust print. So for the traditional publisher, printing on demand can help give consumers what they actually want and advertisers a truly targeted audience to target.
Many magazine publishers have huge inventories of content. This is a huge opportunity for new revenue streams, as that content can be repackaged a thousand different ways. For example, if a consumer is planning on going to Australia, a travel magazine publisher can tap into its archive of content on Australia to create a customized publication, specific to that person’s interests. A magazine's editors and designers know exactly what the most relevant information is for their readers, and those targeted audiences are in turn very attractive to advertisers. Targeted magazines, printed on demand, deliver the highly engaged consumers coveted by marketers. Just ask LIFE.com who recently released a Special Edition Woodstock Magazine to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the historic music event.
Another benefit to printing on demand is waste reduction. Publishers will no longer print excess copies, resulting in cost savings not just for the publisher but across the entire distribution chain.
I think print on demand is truly a part of the industry's future. Publishers don’t need to spend lots of money creating new publications that cover wider audiences; instead they can leverage their existing content, published on demand, slicing and dicing in different ways in order to reach an audience that wants to read this information in a time-tested print magazine format. Here’s a built-in audience of readers that advertisers want to reach.
-Interview by Mark J. Miller
No items were found.
