Each week, it seems, brings more news about how the New Media wave is sucking down more established media players in its undertow. The most recent canary to keel over in the coal mine came today in AdAge, with a story titled “Where Have All The Girls Gone?”
Have all the young women who once loved magazines gone digital? Last
week’s shuttering of Jane and the aborted launch of Cocktail Weekly,
despite the circumstances particular to each book, seem to suggest that
yes, they’re leaving magazines. But a closer look shows that most young
women are actually still there reading — it’s more that the tight ad
market and cacophony of new media options are combining to cull the
field of titles.
However, upon closer inspection, we see that among 15-to-17 year olds, 80% of them still lay on their stomachs in bed, yattering on their cellphones to their girlfriends and turning the pages of whatever glossy it is that they favor that reinforces their negative body images, and teases them with sex advice on how to Do The Naughty without having the whole school talking about you like, y’know, as if you’re a total ho-bag. Shhh-yaaa. So check out the graphic to see where the girls are going…
But as the article makes clear, they aren’t bailing out on mags, it’s just that there are so many other media out there all jumping up and down and demanding their attention. This has clear meaning to any advertiser reading this piece – if they want to reach these spend-crazy girls, they’re going to have to go where they eyeballs are. Viz:
advertisers have had to follow them, meaning advertising budgets for
print that once went toward three or four titles in the field may now
be directed at only the top one or two in order to free up money for
emerging media. ElleGirl was collecting growing hauls of ad money —
until Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. killed it last year at age five,
citing the expense of acquiring new readers every few years.
Among those still doing healthy business, Teen Vogue and CosmoGirl have
turned in steady ad-page growth. Even Seventeen, a behemoth with paid
circulation above 2 million, has felt the pinch: Its estimated ad
revenue fell to $101.9 million in 2006 from $120.8 million in 2002.
This is not even to take into account all the time that girls are plowing into social networking media – the MySpace, FaceBook, etc. This is both a good and bad thing – they aren’t spending so much time just sitting there like eggplants, taking in media and then going to to blow daddy’s HardEarneds on whatever shiny jingly thing that just popped up on their screens. These days, they’re as likely to be writing and posting pics and vids, pouring out their souls to their expanding circle of friends. Like, OMG!~
All this is obviously not the best of news for traditional freelancers – but it is good news for freelancers and media outlets that are comfortable with doing multi-platform releases of information. That is, telling a story in print, web, audio and video, with one version of the story feeding an audience into the other.
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