Magazine Revenues Take a Long-Term Vacation

(MoneyWatch)  Mid-summer is almost always a slow period for magazines -- ad revenue takes a seasonal dip right along with many magazine readers, though the latter are having more fun

The second quarter revenue figures are out today from the Magazine Publishers of America (MPA), and those magazine editors not at the beach may be breaking out in a cold sweat. The more than 250 major titles listed in MPA's report lost on average 7.4 percent in ad revenue through the second quarter of 2008 compared to the same period last year.

But for many prominent titles, the news is far worse. Take a look at this list:

• Business Week (-14%)
• Entertainment Weekly (-16.8%)
• Forbes (-12.6)
• New Yorker (-20.1%)
• Newsweek (-22.4%)
• Rolling Stone (-24.7%)
• Sporting News (-30.9)
• Time (-21.1%)
• US News & World Report (-30.3%)

Most of these publishers can sustain operations for a while bleeding this much red ink, but unless there is a turnaround fairly soon, expect some dramatic changes in the months and year ahead.

A bunch of magazines have failed in the past year, among them Business 2.0, House & Garden, Jane, Stuff, Premiere and Life. There's no reason to think some of the magazines listed above may eventually cease publication as well.

The fundamental question facing publishers is how to effectively migrate to the Web. They all have Web sites of varying quality, and some of them are collecting significant online ad revenues. But the imbalance between their huge print operations and their relatively small digital products is an indication that change comes hard to the magazine industry -- almost as hard as it comes to the newspaper industry.

And we all know what's happening to the newspapers.