Monday, August 31, 2009
Rolling Stone’s Web Failure Wasn’t So Shabby, After All. But Now What?
Conventional wisdom of the day: Magazine mogul Jann Wenner, the man who made his mark with Rolling Stone in the 60s and 70s, and then again with US Weekly in this decade, has blown it on the Web. And now it’s too late for him to catch up.
And who knows? It may even be true. But here’s one bit of nuance to chew on: Magazine mogul Jann Wenner has made money–as in, a profit–on the Web for the last five years.
Time Warner’s AOL can spin positive news out of the miserable results it offered up today. But Ann Moore, who runs Time Warner’s Time Inc. publishing business, will have a tougher time selling that story to investors and Time Warner executives. Will she need to make a second round of cuts?
While the chattering classes continue to pick over Portfolio’s bones, it’s worth checking in on the business titles Condé Nast was targeting with its ill-fated magazine. In short: None of them are suffering from a Portfolio-like swoon, but they’re all in lousy shape. And while we’re at it, let’s dispense with the story that Condé Nast burned $100 million or more on this one.
Yesterday we got a sense of how bad the first quarter was for the magazine business. Today we get a report card from the newspaper industry, and it’s equally grim. Gannett saw more than a third of its publishing ad revenue disappear in the first three months of 2009.
No shock that the Washington Post had a miserable fourth quarter. At least the paper’s online business didn’t fall off a cliff in Q4–which is more than you can say about the New York Times.
Consumers hate Web ads because they’re boring and annoying. Publishers hate them because they get cheaper every day. A group of Yahoo vets, funded by Forbes, thinks they have a solution: Really nice-looking slideshows.
