The NYT business section this morning has a very interesting article about a new on-line publishing venture for higher education. Three former staffers at The Chronicle for Higher Education have banded together to start a new on-line magazine called insidehighered.com.They are attempting to compete with their former employer. What grabbed me about the article was the very revealing look at the numbers they were dealing with.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has long been the giant in the field. Founded in 1966 by Corbin Gwaltney, a former editor at Johns Hopkins University who still owns the publication, it quickly established itself as a must-read for college administrators and faculty. The Chronicle now has a print circulation of just over 85,000 and its Web site gets more than 10 million page views per month.
Talk about the tail. The articles on the site are available only to print subscribers and the subscription costs $82.50 a year. The rub on the Chronicle is that it is supposed to be stodgy and resistant to change. According to an estimate in the September 2004 Advertising Age, The Chronicle grossed $33 million in advertising revenues and $7 million in circulation revenues in 2003, although its total number of advertising pages for the year, 3,169, was down 14 percent from 2002. Not sure if the ad revenue totals include the web.
The new competitor is going to be free to all, not surprising really in that they are trying to take on the "must-read" in the space.
A lot of the traffic must be on the job listings and chat forums but it what lessons can larger magazines take from this model? What can they do to make their subscribers and others come to create page views that multiply their subscriber base many times. What sorts of deep resources or new content do they need to create. Some cases are easier than others to figure out. Smart Money for example has great tools, an amazing Map of the Market and the dynamic nature of investing causes repeat viewing. Shop etc is also doing a great job. But what can a home decorating magazine do to compete with e-bay, antiques road show, and design blogs? It's a tough exercise for a magazine, it needs to train itself to look dispassionately at what it is and develop (often at extra cost) a webcentric space or slant that is pushes its readers to from book and elsewhere. Is there a place for online versions of general interest magazines without focusing on a niche?
