No: Print Is Not the Future of Media. But This Is.
What are marketers looking for going into 2025? With so many options to allocate marketing spend, how can publishers get some? What is our competitive advantage? These are great questions and are some of the ones I’ll be asking Rachel Oppenheim, CRO at Semafor and Imogen Bradbury, CRO at Industry Dive, when they join us on stage at the AMO Summit for a panel we’re calling “What Are Marketers Looking For?” Be sure to grab your ticket today.
In Q2 2024, media companies that use Omeda sent over 1.9 billion emails (makes AMO’s weekly send seem paltry in comparison).
Sending that many emails provides a ton of insight into what’s working for various media companies. And Omeda just released its Q2 2024 Email Engagement Report that looks at how people are engaging with email overall, but also performance by type (marketing, newsletter, etc.).
You should use this report as a way of comparing your results. Are you doing better than the average? Great. Lagging behind? It might be time to clean things up or rethink the types of emails you send.
Download the full report here.
The Onion launches a print newspaper
The fact that it’s 2024 and I am writing about The Onion is impressive. This thing should be dead. As I wrote when G/O Media sold it:
As for The Onion, itself, I can’t help but wonder if it’s a brand from a different era. With the ease with which anyone can be a comedian on social media, do we genuinely need an entire media brand to do it? This feels, to some extent, like what I wrote about last week. Just because a brand appears strong doesn’t mean the business itself is a good move.
But it’s not dead. It’s very much alive. And last week, it announced that it was bringing back its print newspaper. The New York Times wrote about it with the headline: No Joke: The Onion Thinks Print Is the Future of Media.
The print edition is part of a variety of perks that the company plans to offer online subscribers, who pay $5 a month, said Ben Collins, the chief executive of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron. The company plans to offer invites to live events, access to The Onion’s archive of physical papers and sponsorship of ambitious editorial projects, such as a video titled “The Perfect One-Pot, Six-Pan, 10-Wok, 25-Baking-Sheet Dinner,” Mr. Collins said.
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The Onion hopes to begin turning a profit later this year with the help of those subscription add-ons, said Mr. Collins, whose company took over the publication in April.
I seriously hope it does turn a profit because that’ll mean that another media company has found a way to serve its audience and chart a path forward.
But this does not mean that print is the future of media. It’s a bogus assertion. People are not running to subscribe to magazines or newspapers en masse. Those days are over. Ironically, it’s been NYT that has promulgated this idea. In June, it wrote about high-end outdoors magazines. In July, it wrote about an alt weekly getting bought. And then this story.
And look… I love print. If I could, I’d launch a print military history magazine tomorrow. It has a place in the media ecosystem. I’ve written about Firecrown multiple times and had SAVEUR’s Kat Craddock on the AMO Podcast. Print is an awesome product.
But that’s what it is: a product. It’s part of a broader swathe of offerings that media operators should have in their toolkit to ensure that they’re delivering value to their audience. That seems to be the case for The Onion. The print product was, at one point, beloved. And so, if the team is bringing it, it’s theoretically because its audience wants it again.
The New York Times calls out why the team launched a newspaper with this sentence: “But it is also emblematic of a growing trend in the media industry — trying new ways to attract and retain digital subscribers.”
Getting someone to spend $60 a year on humor content might be difficult. Getting them to do it for the joy of receiving something in the mail once a month? That might not be as hard. If The Onion can convince a large number of people to pay, it could move the needle and help it to grow.
But what’s the total addressable market? We can see circulation numbers for various publications using the Alliance for Audited Media. Many of them have high five figures or low-to-mid six figures.
If it gets 25,000 people to pay $60 a year, that’d be $1.5 million in revenue. That’s not insignificant by any means, but I don’t think it’s what we’d all call the future. And that’s gross revenue, so there are still COGS with getting it printed and shipped. It’ll certainly generate profit for The Onion, but how much? I don’t know newspaper economics, but if we assume a 50% margin, that’s $750,000 in profit. That’s good. But it’s not the future of media.
Here is the future of media… niche publications that are highly monetized with reader revenue that have much smaller teams. Print can play a part, but it won’t likely be the part. Let me explain.
I was talking with a friend recently about how miserable social media feels. And we were clamoring for the era of the internet where we all used forums because it was niche and you knew you were part of your tribe. And that’s where I believe things will go with media as time goes on.
Publications will get inherently smaller from an audience perspective. The costs associated with launching a new publication get smaller every year, so that means we can get even more niche. This is why it’s so important to focus on increasing the LTV. We may have fewer people reading us, but if we can better monetize them, all the better.
And that’s why print works as part of a broader product offering. Some percentage of your audience will want it. And getting someone to pay $5 a month for that print product could be the difference between an LTV of $60 per year versus $6 or even $0.60. But for others, it might be events or merchandise or selling research reports.
In many respects, the future of media will necessitate having a much larger reader revenue component. We’ll have no choice but to directly monetize our audiences. Depending entirely on advertising without massive scale will get harder. The traffic arbitrage that many of these large scale publishers have been built on won’t work for the rest of us.
Teams will also get smaller. The Onion is only 15 people. More and more, I expect media companies to have smaller teams, stretching the bounds of what they can accomplish. This is where AI can come in; not on the content side, but on everything else. It can help one person accomplish a lot more, which increases margins and makes the business much healthier.
So, media companies will be more niche and have smaller teams. They can still generate good money, but it’ll be driven more by reader revenue with a complement of advertising. Some of that reader revenue will come from print. It’ll be a good part of the business. But it’s not the future. The future will remain digital with various paid offerings around it. One of those offerings will just get delivered to your door. To the Onion’s credit, this is exactly what they’re trying to do.
Thanks for reading. If you have thoughts, hit reply. Be sure to buy your ticket to the upcoming AMO Summit so you can hear from all of the awesome speakers. Your ticket purchase gets you a full year of AMO Pro included. Have a great rest of your week!
