• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, April 10, 2006

There is a cautionary larger lesson to be learned by content developers (of all forms) in the spate of magazine closings announced last week. While magazine publishers will come up with all sorts of obtuse reasons for the closings, from "no longer fits with our strategy vision for the company" to "hard to compete with the Internet and TV," the fact is, most of the titles should never have been launched in the first place.

There is a herd mentality among producers and publishers who are tasked with predicting and capitalizing on future trends and tastes. If another company launches a product that seems to be successful with audiences and advertisers, then everyone jumps into the pool and tries to "enlarge the category" while really hoping to snatch the ad dollars going to the first mover. That is why you see a half a dozen titles aimed at the same market, all so similar that you could switch the covers around and audiences would never know which book they were reading. TV is even worse. One hit show spawns a raft of imitators, most of which bomb the season they first appear.

Developing programming and launching magazines are expensive, risky ventures that have an extraordinarily high failure rate even under the best of circumstances. With audiences scattering their media usage all over the place from DVRs to cell phones to downloads, there will no longer be a place for multiple titles and shows that look and feel the same. In the business plans and sales PowerPoints of the secondary and tertiary titles are long lists of what makes OUR title better than THEIR title, but they are split hairs that readers and media buyers simply don't care about anymore.

Now that broadcast TV and magazines are under the multiple pressures of not being able to verify who sees their ads or how audiences react to them, reduced spending from Detroit (that could morph in bankruptcy court into NO spending), and the siren song of the Internet, you will see an accelerated pace of cancellations and closings (didn't Heather Graham's show run just once; how many issues did Cargo get out before it shut down?). The distance between those breathless launch claims and the terse farewell notices has closed considerably.

The lesson to be learned is that imitation, while it may be flattering, most often does not lead to a viable business plan. Now that we live in a world of limitless content creation, where everyone can be a producer or a publisher, it will be even more of a challenge to come up with original ideas that please both consumers and advertisers. If there is good news in all this, I think we are also seeing a flight to quality, where the best-established, best-executed media brands will enlarge their share of the pie at the expense of the imitators.