Todd Heft

I grew up in an era of glossy magazines. I loved them: Rolling Stone, Creem, American Photographer, Popular Photography, The New Yorker, Money, Mad, Omni, Spin, Men's Health, Organic Gardening, Newsweek, Time, Life, National Geographic. I subscribed to some and found others on newsstands. Old-timey issues I discovered in thrift shops.

Paying a monthly subscription to those magazines gave you a sense of ownership, like belonging to a club. When the magazine arrived in your mailbox, you were excited to know what juicy nuggets the leaders of your club were to reveal. And you would carry that publication with you sort of like an emblem - it told strangers what you were about and was great for starting conversations: Did you see that Keith Richards interview? Wasn't that collection of Ansel Adams prints amazing? Oh man, that story about that Madoff guy was crazy! You could read a magazine anywhere, anytime, even when the electricity was off. There was also a certain tactile satisfaction to it - the paper in your hands, the smell of the just-off-the-press ink, the quiet ffftt of the pages turning.

When you reached the end, you tossed it out, used it as a coaster in your first apartment, or let it lay around for a few months for anyone else to read. If it was a really memorable issue, you threw it on your bookshelf in case you wanted to re-read that article on capturing the perfect shot of a bird in flight, how Martha decorates at Christmas, or that amazing story by Isaac Asimov. Or maybe fashion was your thing, and your Vogue collection became an essential reference.

Sometime around 2000, most publishers moved online because that's where readers wanted to consume their content. After all, they thought, why would a reader pay for a subscription when they could get the same thing for free? Seemed like a great idea. But it was a heavy and expensive lift: besides publishing new content, usually at a faster cadence, legacy publishers also digitized and posted their archives. Websites grew to millions of pages almost overnight, requiring a larger IT department and more server space. This migration changed the business model - it was out with the old and in with the new (fire one experienced middle-aged legacy journalist and hire three 22-year-old newbie freelancers).

Initially, competition was minimal, and each brand carried a lot of heft. Publishers saw promising ad revenue from digital ads, which justified the changes. But two things accompanied the change: 1) The cost of entry to publishing dropped to the point that almost anyone who believed they could write could start an online publication with almost no investment, and 2) Google and other companies introduced ad delivery networks by which publishers could make their digital advertising space available to any advertiser, freeing publishers from the cost of paying a sales staff to sell that inventory. That's when upstart, online-only publishers started causing real problems for legacy publishers. Readers didn't really care - or even notice - where their content was coming from as long as it entertained or informed, however minimally. As paper costs, printing costs, and circulation costs increased, along with other legacy costs (office space, equipment, and labor), it made economic sense to lean into a digital presence and cut what was no longer valuable, i.e. profitable. The downward spiral accelerated into a feedback loop accompanied by headlines announcing the death of print publishing.

Around 2004, the nascent idea of SEO and page optimization grew into a digital marketing discipline. SEO practitioners became wise to how Google ranked pages and served search results. Gaming the Google algorithm could move an article to the top of search results and command a large share of traffic. And more traffic meant (potentially) more ad clicks.

Google never actually revealed details about its algorithm, but SEO disciples (me included) made educated guesses about what might work. And when it did work, traffic went up along with ad clicks and impressions. It was so worth crowing about that some websites added "hit counters" to show the volume of traffic they were getting. Thus began the "what's popular must be good" ethos.

Every journalist's job suddenly depended on clicks (aka "eyeballs) - it was like a big game, except that the writer's livelihood was at stake. Out were creative headlines like "The Banshee Screams For Buffalo Meat" (Hunter S. Thompson, Rolling Stone, 1977), to be replaced for infinity by "The 100 best [fill in the blank] of all time" (by 7 writers you never heard of, Variety, 2024). Headlines became super-hyperbolic, especially in politics, where every utterance guaranteed to inflame at least one person became a headline, sometimes with only three paragraphs in the "story." And if you thought the best-of listicle writer was full of crap or that political writer was biased, and you flamed them in a comment, all the better because that helped SEO. Any writer worth their salt had to wonder why they went to Columbia Journalism School and how they'd ever repay those college loans on freelancer wages. Hyperbolic headlines, automated and adjusted by software programs based on clicks, became stock in trade.

Eventually complicating matters for publishers were ad blockers and ad "blindness" - readers got used to seeing ads (if they saw them at all) and didn't consciously notice them, much less click on them. This caused publishers and companies that serve digital ads to invent new types of ads you were almost guaranteed to accidentally click on. These annoying and interruptive ads compromised user experience. And when UX decayed, users had less interest in returning or spending significant time on the site. These ads also arrived with bloated code that slowed down page load speed. And users had no patience for slow-loading pages. Hence, the flywheel: bad UX=less satisfied users=less revenue=more ads to try and recapture revenue=worse UX.

In defense of publishers, once-lucrative digital ad revenue per click is now a pittance of what it was (this doesn't refer to ads sold in apps). Ad networks now keep 50-60% of ad revenue, and there is no way to know from your analytics how many of those clicks are from bots vs actual humans (this is a serious problem ad networks need to address). Plus, social media used to drive a TON of traffic to publishers, but now that's gone too. Social platforms want you to stay on their platforms and never leave, so they've de-emphasized any post with outbound links in your feed. That's why there's no end of short, funny video clips if that's what you like. If you click on angry political videos, that's what you'll see more of. The algo knows what you want.  We're told that digital ad spending is eternally growing, which is true. But that figure includes spending on social media and search ads, which account for the Lion's share of that pie. The share of digital advertising publishers see per user continues to deteriorate and will continue to as AI-generated search results with fewer organic links become the norm.

Many forward-thinking publishers have already migrated to the subscription model. Those who moved thoughtfully and not out of desperation are winning. Readers don't appear to have a big issue paying for content if they see value in it.

Subscriptions are quickly becoming the King and Queen and the entire royal court in publishing, especially among Gen Z and Millennial readers. A recent article in the New York Times (to which I happily fork over a monthly subscription fee) tells how a scrappy, recently laid-off team of writers from the music magazine Pitchfork have started their own online thing:

"Advertising is no longer the main event, part of a plan to avoid chasing clicks. Instead, Hearing Things will sell subscriptions aimed at people eager to learn about music and musicians they might not have heard of before.

"Most of the publication will be free to read. But it will offer several subscription tiers for those who want a deeper experience. A basic subscription...includes unlimited access to the site and the ability to comment on the site. The highest tier, Super Deluxe Remastered Hi-Fi Membership...includes a handmade mix CD or cassette or streaming playlist made by a Hearing Things editor, as well as quarterly hangouts with the staff."

This is the way journalism should be, especially in the entertainment world. And thankfully, it's a model being adopted across the publishing universe.

And growing subscriptions aren't just digital - niche print publications are growing like mad (yay!). Apparently, young readers are agog at dipping into a printed magazine.

Let's finally drive a stake through the heart of the idea that readers won't pay for information when there are free options. The free model created a death race to the bottom - the only question is, have we arrived there yet?

Resources for your enjoyment:

Big Tech Says Publishers Keep Majority of Ad Revenue, But Experience Suggests Otherwise, News Media Alliance

Newspapers Fact Sheet, Pew Research Center

Digital Advertising - Worldwide, Statista

In a Digital Age, High-End Outdoors Magazines Are Thriving in Print, New York Times

U.S. Digital Publishing Industry - Statistics & Facts, Statists

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