Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

The print magazine market continues to struggle as it is trying its usual strategy of saying the cost of paper and postal rates have gone up, and as a result, media buyers need to pay more for their ads. While this little game has gone on for years, it no longer has any impact upon pricing; it's being rejected outright from the beginning of these negotiations.

For print magazines, the market is going through the exact same thing the music industry has for years. There is a transitional period where the ad money is gravitating online. The magazine industry is trying to salvage what they can through their print offerings to keep up with what they used to make. It's a futile attempt that will never hold.

Most media is attempting to retain the same earnings while they are transitioning, and I think this is a huge mistake ... it puts the focus on the wrong thing.

The vast majority of their creativity and energy needs to be directed to the Internet, rather than trying to continue to figure out how to maintain what they have while slowly adopting the Internet content platform.

Of course this doesn't mean that there won't be winners in the print magazine world. There are some a-listers that will be able to retain and grow their ad growth, but overall it's not going to continue to happen in the general industry.

The good news is that some of the publishers are working to offset the ad spend drop on their print magazines by facing reality and focusing on the Internet as the growth vehicle of the future.

Steven Bloom, senior vice president and director of magazines for Zenith says that "Magazine budgets are downshifting and going to the internet. But the same amount of money is flowing into their companies. The magazine revenue is just going to different places. Magazines don’t operate in isolation anymore. They are making up what they are losing through online sales."

I'm a little suspicious of the comments made here that "the same amount of money is flowing into their companies." If that was accurate, we would have to wonder why companies like Time Inc. are laying off significant number of workers if the money is still flowing and simply being redistributed via other platforms. I think it's just wishful thinking.

The other problem is that there is much more competition on the Internet as well, with barriers-to-entry far less than in the print industry, money is beginning to move to other online content providers outside the magazine industry.

The disruption will never stop and in many cases they have been far too slow to respond to the changing realities of the marketplace. Only time will tell who will survive and thrive. Many people have already embraced new startup content providers and bypass the print titles now produced on the Internet entirely.