In an article for Crain’s published December 10th, Matthew Flamm highlights the 195 print titles launched in 2012. According to Flamm, “there were also 24 print titles, most notably Newsweek and Spin, that fell into the netherworld of digital-only publication.” The approximately 10% increase in print title launches this year may be a red herring, though. How many digital-only titles started up in 2012 (versus the 24 print titles that moved to the web)?
That number is difficult to estimate, especially because so many digital-only titles are small and lack the heft of major advertisers. One common claim is that small digital-only magazines are the equivalent of “zines” or other homegrown, DIY, limited circulation publications. There are two important distinctions between digital and print zines:
1. Cost to Market: There is functionally zero material cost involved in the production of small digital magazines. No paper, just a pdf hosted for free on a site like Issuu. Digital publishing, whether of small or large products, entails significantly lower financial risk than print publishing. Putting out too many magazines (or books) is a bad idea in the print world, where an overinvestment in inventory can backlash into big losses. It is impossible to put out too many digital magazines or e-books, because there is no discrete number produced.
2. Virality: For a print zine to go viral, individual consumers need to distribute and reproduce the publication en masse. That requires a heroic amount of energy from a passive audience of readers. For a digital zine to go viral, individual consumers need only to click a link or copy and paste. And thanks to digital advertising models that allow for instant implementation of new ads, real-time analytics, and continuous revenue generation, virality pays off online. Print virality doesn’t make money for a publisher directly, whereas digital virality does.
The netherworld of digital magazine publishing is likely the real space of magazine expansion, not print. Flamm’s numbers are encouraging, at least to the extent that they indicate a healthy market for magazine content. But digital-only publications are undeniably the future.