I’m attending the Future of Business Media conference in Manhattan, and probably
the most surprising thing so far is how impressive Susan Clark was, on a panel
about business magazines. Clark is the global marketing director of the Economist,
and while everybody else is concentrating on "liquid content" and
"wide aperture stories" and other such buzzwords (thankfully, there’s
no sign of the magabrand
as yet), the Economist seems to be doing extremely well by staying narrowly
focused on the refreshingly old-fashioned goal of increasing the number of subscribers
to the magazine.
While economist.com and the events business do contribute to the bottom line,
says Clark, they contribute even more to building the Economist brand, and making
it more likely that people will subscribe and renew and get into the habit of
reading the magazine in their favorite armchair at home every weekend. The Economist’s
readers, says Clark, "read us out of choice, they don’t read us to get
ahead in business" – which may or may not have been a response to
Roger McNamee, an investor in Forbes, who said earlier on that "most of
our audience wakes up every day hoping that somewhere they’ll get the insight
that makes them rich."
Economist.com is (almost) free, then, because that’s the best way to make it
easy for people to find stories and to decide that they like them so much they
want to subscribe to the magazine. Clark isn’t worried about cannibalism: "most
people would not read the entire magazine online," she says. The bits of
the website which aren’t free (archives over a year old, some multimedia content)
are free to subscribers: they’re a way of making subscribers feel special.
All of this makes perfect sense to me. International business executives want
and need to be broadly informed, but they’re also busy, and they love the roll-up-able
magazine which they enjoy reading at home or on the plane, not on their computer
screen. The website basically serves to remind them of how much they like to
do that. Those of us who live on the web will keep on pushing at them to do
things like serve
full RSS feeds; I’m sure that they will do sooner rather than later. But
I am sold on the idea that an old-fashioned magazine like the Economist has
managed to retain its old business model in an age when everybody else seems
to be jettisoning their old business models in favor of the unknown.