Markets & Media

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Last night, Dwell Media revealed the findings of their newly-created “Dwell Strategy and Research” division’s study regarding the “New Face of Affluence.” As we mentioned in an earlier post, the study took an in-depth dive into the buying habits and motivations, desires, brand loyalties and concerns of a select group of individuals. The group consisted 2,230, 61% of whom are men, who are mostly in their 40s and came from households with an income of over 100,000. Interestingly, not all of those surveyed were Dwell magazine subscribers, although all involved did have some familiarity with Dwell Media as a multi-platform brand.

The report includes mentions of 620 brands ranging from the likes of Target and IKEA to LVMH Group and Richemont.

Click through for more information on what Dwell Strategy and Research discovered — and what this information means for consumers and brands alike.

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Yesterday was all doom and gloom for the future of print over at The New York Times, which reported an average newsstand loss in the magazine industry of 9.1 percent and an overall circulation decline of 2.2 percent from the previous year. While we floated the idea that some of the publishers that actually showed gains (Rodale and Meredith) operated in a niche market for customers, there might be even better news over at AdAge, where Nat Ives pointed out that the individual sale losses have actually slowed down in the past year. Big sellers like Cosmopolitan and Us Weekly either slowed down their decline to the single digits, or actually improved their single-copy sales, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. So what’s the logic behind the market? Why did Us Weekly gain 1 percent in sales while In Touch plummeted over 10 percent? And what can cause a magazine to do fare better in subscription form than single-issue, like Woman’s Day?

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According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, as quoted in The New York Times today, newsstand sales for magazines dropped 9.1 percent last year, with overall subscriptions 2.23 percent. Popular individual titles fell anywhere from 41 percent (W magazine) to 30 percent (Good Housekeeping).

But this isn’t all bad news: the titles that have done well in the past year, that have actually seen increases, are niche titles like Off-Road Adventures, which saw a 483 percent increase in circulation, and Rodale titles like Men’s and Women’s Health. One reason for this is that these types of print publications cater to a specific die-hard fan that may not be as willing to trade on free content.

Read More: Magazines’ Newsstand Sales Fall 9.1 Percent — New York Times

Despite heavy losses and layoffs over the past year, newspaper publishers are starting to show positive numbers as the fourth quarter earnings results trickle in.

Virginia-based Media General Inc. (MEG), publisher of The Tampa Tribune and Richmond Times-Dispatch posted a profit for the fourth quarter, reporting net income of $27.4 million for the last part of 2009.

Although revenues for the company were down, so were operating expenses — due in part to a reduction in force and other “aggressive” cost-cutting measures. Explained CEO Marshall N. Morton:

“We had nearly 900 fewer employees at the end of 2009 compared with 2008 year-end, and we implemented a five-day furlough program in the 2009 fourth quarter.”

Morton’s outlook for 2010 was actually pretty sunny, considering the grim fate of the media industry recently. Thanks to the publisher’s already reorganized “market-based structure” and lower cost base, Media General hopes to make gains throughout the year helped along by the recovering economy, revenues from the Winter Olympics, which are being broadcast on the NBC affiliate stations it owns, and political revenues.

Read more: Earnings press release

Previously: Possible Job Cuts Ahead As Media General Mulls Consolidation

Reporting its fourth quarter and year-end earnings report today, newspaper publisher The McClatchy Co. seemed optimistic about the future of classified and online advertising.

Although the company reported declines in revenue for the quarter and the year — down 16.5 percent for the fourth quarter compared to last year and down 22.6 percent for the year — circulation revenues actually increased by 6.6 percent during the last quarter of the year, along with online advertising revenues, which were up 14.9 percent for the quarter. Circ revenues grew a total of 4.8 percent year over year.

CEO Gary Pruitt pointed to the uptick in digital advertising as an important growth point for the company, and added that classified ads seem to be making a comeback:

“We’re seeing some evidence of a recovery in classified advertising. It’s typically the first area of our business to suffer in a downturn — and also the first to rebound when the economy improves.”

McClatchy is also workoing on a “transition to a successful hybrid print and online company,” as its online audiences and Web advertising continues to grow. In fact, the company’s online advertising across its papers’ sites make up 16.2 percent of its total advertising revenue for the year.

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When entertainment industry trade Variety decided to put its online content behind a pay wall earlier this month, it promised options for how users would go about paying. (Random selection being one of the more out there ideas we’ve heard for pay walls, but hey, everyone is trying something new.)

Other Web sites like those belonging to The Financial Times have embarked on a plan that would eventually allow users to purchase individual articles for a small fee, much like buying a song from iTunes for 99 cents instead of the whole album for $10.

Media analysts don’t necessarily agree that bringing down the price of content (even if it costs customers more money in the long run) will make potential readers take out their wallets. Jay Rosen New York University journalism professor, Bryan Keefer of The Daily Beast and Josh Benton of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab both see the chink in pay walls’ armor as being that the majority of people just won’t pay for content in its current state, period. (Rosen actually predicted the paradoxical idea of paid-for “exclusivity” appealing to link-obsessed readers in a 2005 article for The Huffington Post.) So the people already paying for subscriptions will continue to pay, and the rest won’t be typing in their credit card information, no matter how small the fee is.

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Stocks for The New York Times Co. (NYT) and Gannett Co. Inc. (GCI) rose this morning after a Wells Fargo analyst raised his ratings for the media companies’ stock.

In a holiday gift to the newspaper publishers, analyst John Janedis told investors that the stocks were hot because the ad market for papers seems to be “improving more quickly than we previously anticipated,” Reuters reported. This is great news for the Times Co. and Gannett, which publishes USA Today, but is it true?

The problem, says Reuters media reporter Robert MacMillan, is that publishers like the Times Co. and Gannett have managed to improve their bottom line more with cost-cutting than increased ad revenues. They still struggle to make money from a dying print product while not really being able to capitalize on their online market. “The newspaper stock recovery, as a result, is one that will benefit investors in the short term and does not necessarily indicate confidence in publishers’ long-term futures,” MacMillan concluded.

So now here’s something newspaper publishers can request for Christmas: a plan that will save them in the long term.

Gannett, NY Times rise on analyst holiday gift –Reuters

Previously: New York Times Co. Reports Ad Revenue Down, Circ Revenue Up In Q3

You’d never know it from the cuts across the board being made at publishers like Time Inc. and Forbes Media, but some of these companies’ titles are seeing a upswing in their readership. Lucia Moses of MediaWeek reported this week that Fortune, The Economist, Smart Money, The Wall Street Journal, Inc. and Forbes have all seen an increase in readers, ironically because of all the financial terror that has caused their publishers to make cuts in the first place.

So while audiences bemoan Rupert Murdoch‘s pay wall plans, following The Wall Street Journal model, the paper itself has seen an 11.6 percent growth in overall readership from last year. And while Fortune may be cutting as many as 40 staffers over the next several weeks as part of Time Inc.’s reduction plan and Forbes let go 100 employees just last month, the two magazines have grown to 4.1 million (9 percent increase) and 6 million (11.5 percent) in total readers, respectively. And with the current trend seeing unemployment still on the rise among executives, you can bet one place they won’t be cutting back: their subscriptions to business magazines. Maybe next year’s jump in readers will be big enough that these titles can actually hire back some of their emaciated newsroom.

Read More: Report: Business Magazines See Uptick in Readership

Previously: First on FBNY: Time Inc. Shutters Custom Pub Fortune Small Business, Forbes Layoffs Decimate Staff, Time Inc. Closes Door on Buyouts Today, WSJ Looks To Claim Title Of Number One Paper In Circulation

The New York Times posted an article yesterday on the hesitancy of Americans, compared to other countries’ citizens, to pay for news they read online. This has been an issue we’ve seen come up a lot recently with the explosion of pay walls, and a study done by the Boston Consulting Group shows that in America, where only half the residents polled said they’d be willing to pay for content, the issue is more pressing than it is other Western countries. But where have we seen numbers like this before?

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