Lecţie: Cere preţul corect şi acceptă-ţi nişa
Mai puțină reclamă e unul dintre motivele pentru care revistele americane au de suferit în criză. Poate și mai important e că modelul de business care le permitea să supraviețuiască când *aveau* reclamă era greșit, construit pe tiraje umflate și prețuri de dumping, care creau ideea unui număr mult mai mare de cititori loiali. O explicație simplă o dă Michela O’Connor, care conduce Dwell, care e mai degrabă o comunitate de design decât o simplă revistă:
Do you think magazines, especially those in Dwell’s category, can survive the recession?
I do, but only if they are charging the right fee to the reader. I’m oversimplifying the problem in the industry, but honestly, I find it crazy that at the root of the problem is the fact that the industry banked so heavily on advertising dollars. Then, magazines had to drive their circulations to unnatural levels — way beyond what a natural circ would be for their core communities — in order to please an advertiser. In 2002, believe me, everybody in New York, all the agencies and clients, said to me, “Call me when your circulation is at a quarter million and call me again when you’re at 500,000, and we’ll work with you then.” That has changed dramatically. I didn’t give in to that, because I knew it was the wrong thing to do for our model. But the larger media companies did do that. And in order to maintain those circ levels, they did things like charge 50 cents an issue and $3.50 on the newsstand, so when advertising came down, there was nothing to rely on. We’ve actually been increasing our newsstand price so that we’re now $5.99 on the newsstand. We have the luxury of not having to pump our circulation up past 325,000. The reason I believe that print will be here a long time is that we do have a lot of intelligent people in this industry who now realize the folly in chasing an ad base, and they’re now cutting rate bases, as you see.
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