Comments on: Proof That Social Media is Killing Print Magazines

By: Ed Rowland

Ed Rowland — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:40:44 +0000

TV did not kill radio, the DVD did not kill the CD, Vista did not kill XP (how could it it was worse), but CD did kill the tape and the record so who knows where we are going ? I do believe times are changing but as others have said they always do. The difference is the rate of speed in which these changes take place. 100 years ago you got less info in your life as you do in a day now and for 200 years less in your life as we do now before lunch. Social Media we change alot but it is not the final answer to Public media, magazines and newspapers. Believe me there is more to come and will only get better… or worse, depending on which side of the table your standing and it will happen even faster…

By: JOHNNY

JOHNNY — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 04:27:10 +0000

That is just nuts.. I did not even know that Vibe magazine shut down.. But Print magazines will always exist , its easier to hold a magazine in the bathroom then a Laptop while on the pooper!

By: JuiceeLinks

JuiceeLinks — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:46:01 +0000

Magazines aren’t dying. They are evolving. Print may never go away entirely, but the subscription rates needed to make it a viable business are declining rapidly in favor of online/social access.

Word to the wise: if you are in the publishing business, you had better develop an online strategy quickly–and one that earns revenue.

By: Brian

Brian — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:57:27 +0000

It’s not clear to me how this is proof….

You show that social media has boomed within the past year, and then show that magazines decline in the early 2000′s (it’s also not clear if they had been declining before this time), but you fail to note that most social media as we know it now did not exist back in the early 2000′s. These graphs don’t imply correlation, or even that one is the cause of the other.

I could just as easily replace your graph of the unique monthly visitor hits of facebook, with a graph of the world’s population over time and the conclusions we could draw from these graphs would be just as useless.

By: Brenna DeLeo

Brenna DeLeo — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:58:45 +0000

I completely agree. Magazines were great ways to stay up to date on your hobbies or interests, now you can do that online with added interaction and real time information. The internet is changing the way we not only see magazines but news as well. Print newspaper sales are seeing less and less demand, and we will begin to see discontinuations of large proportions.

By: Nemo

Nemo — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:49:26 +0000

Social media is not “killing” print media, it’s competing with it. Print media will change but it’s not going to die, Chicken Little. Nickelodeon, Southern Accents, Wondertime, Travel and Leisure Golf died: how exactly is any of that a surprise? Did you ever look at any of those boring, overly-specialized, ad-glutted, content-free snoozers? Ever since the magazine was invented in the US, they’ve cropped up like mushrooms and died as quickly, in waves. I’m betting there won’t be room for big. bloated behemoths that require commensurate advertising revenues but that magazines as a species of media will mutate, adapt and continue.

By: Ginny Logan

Ginny Logan — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:19:42 +0000

It would be interesting for them to run numbers of how many newspapers and print magazines have lost real estate sections and/or broker purchases of ad space…it would be staggering!

By: Darryl

Darryl — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:33:39 +0000

I think this was inevitable really, social media offers an interaction that people crave, it’s more engaging for an audience to be able to give and receive feedback quickly, and increasingly this is becoming realtime with the advent of technologies like Google Wave. I think it’s only a matter of time before content is produced on sites in realtime, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility already with AJAX but lacking a great implementation. With HTML 5 I think many of the new apps will further increase the interactivity and push towards a real-time web!

Regards,

Darryl

By: Kyle

Kyle — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 21:37:05 +0000

These are some of the best graphical representations of the decline of traditional media that I’ve seen. Well done! It will be interesting to see how large media companies attempt to reverse their slide into irrelevance.

By: David Whitehouse

David Whitehouse — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:36:27 +0000

Not trying to be negative, its a lovely picture and I’m sure it is correct, but your graphs don’t correlate if you base it on date.

You show the demise of newspapers up until 2008, beginning in 2000, yet your graph shows social media from September 2008 on wards, so only a 3 month correlation.

I think perhaps the Internet as a whole has killed magazines, not social media in particular, I think as soon as the Internet was invented it was obvious magazines would eventually be phased out…

It just takes time.