Magazines remain media’s darlings!

Yes, we can talk about declining print revenues, shrinking readerships and the bruises Covid left on magazines worldwide. It certainly changed how we do business at Media24, South Africa’s biggest publisher. However, navigating these initial dire realities are now our inspirator. After digging a little deeper, we found opportunities that keep our innovative teams busy and excited and our communities engaged.

Niche to meet you!

During the Covid lockdowns, we saw a huge spike in consumption of niche content (most of it in print) like puzzles, gardening, knitting and cooking among South African audiences.

We know online consumers are looking to be informed of current events and entertained by escapist content. This is quite an odd mix for traditional media brands – how do we tick all the boxes for our users on one platform without compromising credibility or entertainment value?

Exactly that drove our niche focus – especially in the lifestyle space. All our 14 magazine titles are now publishing brand extensions that focus on special interests within the core markets that fill the gaps the digital world can’t necessarily capture locally. And where practical, we have the content available online. We publish more than 100 special interest magazines yearly – serving a multitude of special interest communities.

For example, our leading English female title Fair Lady publishes stand-alone diet magazines that focus on current trends – be it banting or fasting. The one brand extension that really hit the spot recently, is a menopause-focused publication titled HOT. We will also be hosting reader conferences this year on the topic.

Dear reader, show us the money (and your data)

The biggest challenge for traditional media is obviously the change in our business model - advertising revenue from traditional sources has shifted. In answer to this, we re-focussed on our core premise: Content. Delivering compelling, relevant, always-fresh quality content on world class delivery platforms.

Firstly, we increased print products’ cover prices quite significantly over the past few years. Our editors had a hard time with this one – they believed paying so much more would shrink our audiences significantly. Yes, the print audience numbers declined, but the trade-off on revenue has been an essential win.

Secondly, we invested heavily in the digital subscription model. PDF copies as well as sharing our brand content on Media24’s top digital news platforms, have ensured our communities have a digital home. And it is not for free.

It’s no secret: If a user sees value in unique content, they will come and they will pay.

The resistance to paying for digital content was initially miscalculated by digital publishers across the globe. Our focus on delivering trustworthy content delivered seamlessly to audiences is showing positive signs. We have seen successes that include Media24’s Afrikaans news paywall platform, Netwerk24, which launched in 2014 and has now almost reached 100 000 subscribers. The success of Netwerk24 has been hugely dependent on our ability to provide compelling, original, and premium content for a very specific audience. We have branched out by providing different content types, including audiobooks, games, short form soapies, and relevant video content. Essentially it is content that is unique, exclusive, and compelling.

Creating centres of content excellence

To ensure we could maintain and even improve the quality of content of our magazines, we introduced a new model in 2020 and outsourced the editorial functions of six of our magazines.

Despite the model being an effective cost management strategy, Covid highlighted the need of our editorial teams to operate more freely. In each case, existing editors established their own media company and created a partnership with Media24. Now Media24 focuses on the business of the business: Advertising sales, distribution, and marketing. And the creatives can focus on what they love – corporate hassles and red tape are no longer part of their lives. They run their own businesses, put together their own teams and most importantly, have more capacity than before to innovate and create content that speaks to their communities. Each of these publications are thriving – creatively and financially.

The more, the merrier!

The transition for our brands from paper to online has been an ongoing process of trial and error over the past two decades. More recently we decided to ringfence a few of our traditional print brand’s online presence under a new brand.

SNL24.com (an acronym for soccer, news and lifestyle) launched in September 2022 and is a curated platform providing a home for five titles that have a resonance in the middle black South African market. It includes two soccer titles, a news tabloid, a lifestyle and female title.

The new platform SNL24 appeals to soccer fans and those in search of engaging news and entertaining lifestyle content. Aimed at the middle and upper-middle markets, SNL24 boasts a potential target audience of 3.7 million and, when combined with an established print audience of 2.1 million, offers a comprehensive, integrated, and multi-platform communication opportunity for advertisers. The brands represented on the platform all have significant audience credibility and loyalty and complement each other as a collective, together improving their individual abilities to retain eyeballs.

What SNL24 has taught us is that scale improves our ability to migrate audiences to a digital platform and it takes time to build new brands. The platform uses AI to identify brand lovers and keeps them busy with their preferred content – and will then introduce more content from the other brands based on their reading preferences. Despite its recent launch the unique browser stats are really encouraging. And with a low-priced subscription model, we hope to not only build scale but grow additional revenue in the long run via paying consumers.

(And a side-note – destroying the silos between newspapers and magazines and refocusing content on communities and interest groups, has been much easier than I ever dreamed.)

It’s certainly not bad news for magazines. The world is waiting for our darlings.

Ferreira will speak at Indian Magazine Congress on March 24.

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not in any way represent the views of exchange4media.com