Electronics Manufacturing and Procurement (EM&P) has closed with immediate effect according to a letter on its homepage. The publisher gives the reasons of ‘a massive drop in [advertisers'] promotional spend’ and says ‘page rates have reduced, but costs have increased’.
The title had an unaudited circulation of 12,000 and was (surprise, surprise) controlled free circulation.
There you have it in a nutshell – no circulation revenue, advertising rates being cut, advertisers falling away, costs going up.
More good news from the USA. Folio: reports B-to-B Ad Revenues, Pages Continue Decline
They’ve also got this link to the ytd figures which shows the performance of different categories (for revenue and number of advertising pages). Although the overall picture is grim – pages down 7%, revenue down more than 5% – some sectors are doing even more poorly. Let’s hear it for double digit falls for Automotive, Computing, Electronic Engineering, and Resources + Utilities.
The reason why this matters is that although the US economy is in a worse state than ours it’s not too much worse and, more importantly, the structural changes that their publishing industry is going through are the ones that are also hitting us.
The Business Media Blog has this entertaining piece on how circulations have fallen for B2B magazines over the past ten years. The US experience (and that of the newspaper industry) shows us that things ain’t going to get better.
Press Gazette: Business magazine Music Week is now without any news reporters or a web editor following a round of redundancies.
Will the good news from the publishing market never end? Here’s Future stepping into the spotlight with their interim results (Future ‘cautiously optimistic’ from Press Gazette, you can download the whole thing here.)
As always the devil is in the detail. Take this, for example, from the figures on UK performance: “UK revenue for the half-year fell by 2%. Circulation revenue fell by 4% … subs revenue was up 9% and export grew 3%, which helped to offset the reduction of 9% in newsstand revenue in the period.” Even if cover prices haven’t risen over the past 12 months this would be a bit of washout, but factor in even a small amount of cover price inflation and you’re looking at the number of magazines sold falling quite considerably.
Or the fact that “UK advertising revenue was 1% down”. In this market, surely a great performance? But let’s dig a wee bit deeper. Apologies here because the next figures are for the group as a whole, not just the UK sector: overall advertising revenue rose from £24.9m to £25.3m. Deeper still, boys and girls, because this figure is the total of print and online ad revenues. Online grew from 15% of the total (i.e. £3.7m) to 19% (£4.8m) – Frazer’s abacus suggests that this means that print advertising has fallen by nearly £700,000 in actual terms, not factoring in inflation.
Future’s shares are down 7.6% on this morning’s opening, close to their 12 month low.
ESE magazine (Embedded Systems Engineering – what do you mean you’ve never heard of it?) has fallen over.
Another B2B niche controlled circulation title goes bye-bye.
Boris Johnson, is to scrap The Londoner, which was distributed to 3 million homes across London.
