Passage to India: Magazines Also Out-Sourcing Success

You’d be hard-pressed to find a happy story these days about the American magazine industry. Everything is doom and gloom, and plummeting ad sales, and it seems as though a week doesn’t go by where at least one publication isn’t shuttered for good. What is a magazine person to do? Move to India, of course!

NYT is reporting that an “explosion” of Western magazines have been hitting Indian shelves over the past twelve months to great success &#151 magazine advertising is expected to grow(!) by 20 percent in 2008 to $302 million. Titles such as Vogue, Rolling Stone, OK!, Hello, Maxim, FHM, Golf Digest, People and Marie Claire, with GQ and Fortune to follow are all familiar to Indian readers. What people may not realize is that the magazines are all “written, photographed, edited and designed almost completely in India” and even though the content is in English it’s primarily just the names that are being licensed. What is the lesson here? Obviously we are outsourcing the wrong things!

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