Yesterday, I blogged about the catastrophic decline in advertising in the nation's newspapers and now Publisher's Information Bureau reports that the magazine industry is facing a similarly bleak situation. It's not surprising given that the key drivers behind declines -- a shift toward the internet by readers and weak consumer spending leading companies to cut back on overall ad spending -- are the same.
For the first quarter, magazine ad pages were down 25.9% over the prior year quarter. U.S. News & World Report, plunged almost 69% and Wired was down 57.2%. Boating, Sporting News, Boating Life, Sport Fishing, Power & Motoryacht, and Power Cruising were all down over 50%.
Sports Illustrated for Kids somehow managed to pull off a 29% increase in ad pages and Hallmark Magazine was up 30.5%, but even that wasn't enough to save it from being shut down in February.
When the economy improves, magazines may be able to save their flagging print operations with increased revenue from online advertising. But in the fourth quarter of 2008 online ad revenue was up just 2.6%, nowhere close to good enough to bail out massive declines in print. And the online advertising market is getting worse, at least for now.
Long-term, it's probably no cause for worry though. Unless, of course, you're one of the many, many media companies that took on too much debt to make too many acquisitions and buy back too much stock, and now you don't have the capital to hold during a prolonged downturn.
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