Another print mag falls victim to the Internet
March 26, 2007InfoWorld just announced they’re ceasing publication of the print magazine. It’s all about the Web site and their events business now. No more ad revenue coming in from the print side of the house.
Most of the news I’ve seen, like the New York Times’ recent quarter, shows that the loss of print revenue is far greater than the gains in Web revenue. So you have to wonder how painful the shuttering of InfoWorld’s print business is going to be for them. It’s got to be a significant chunk of revenue going away, though obviously InfoWorld’s management decided the costs of that revenue were too high.
I’m guessing for a tech mag like InfoWorld this isn’t as big a deal as it would be for more traditional publishers. Most of their advertisers were already spending the majority of their ad budgets online anyway. There’s little point chasing after the rapidly dwindling print ad dollars from tech advertisers.
They aren’t the first and definitely won’t be the last magazine to try out the Web-only route. I wish them the best of luck, but it will be tough going for them. The market for tech news is so dispersed, there’s so many options users have, that generating enough page views for InfoWorld.com is going to be their big challenge.