Editor's Blog Jun 08th 2012
Save Our Trees
The death of the printed word is nigh, however our thirst for the written word needs to be sated. Most normal people today get their news, books and magazines online. This has seen a slump in the sales of printed matter over the last few years, with many well-known publications folding, so to speak.
Many of the UK national papers and broad sheets all have an Internet edition, which allows you to access it from the many modern communication devices available.
In Gibraltar we have seen many local interest magazines migrate to the Internet, but many still keep a death grip on the printed version, to keep their advertising clients happy.
You see in Gibraltar many business owners are still under the impression that the internet is not the best place to run adverts as it is not something tangible, it’s not something they can fold up and put in their back pocket.
With magazine runs of 3000 to 6000 units circulated monthly, potentially only 3000 to 6000 people will see your advert, if they have not binned it completely after taking a quick look at the young lady in a bikini on the cover.
Now here is the pitch, the Internet advertising revenues hit $7.3 Billion for the first Quarter of 2012. Yes, you heard me, 7.3 BILLION! With a year over year increase of 23% according to PwC and IAB.
Now why do you think that is? Well for starters there are 6,930,055,154 Internet users worldwide, every single one a potential customer for your business. But here in Gibraltar, business people have been very slow on the uptake, not taking advantage of getting their product or service seen daily instead of monthly in printed form, which inevitably ends up as lining at the bottom of a budgie cage.
Our parent site gets in excess of 30,000 hits a month, mostly from local IP addresses and about 28% from overseas. For a small company like ours this is humongous, think about it? Your product/service on our pages viewed by 1600 people a day, in advertising terms you get so much more bang for your buck and for longer.
Its like the difference between a firecracker and a car packed with PE4 high explosive.
The Printed Magazine is dead, long live the Digital Magazine.
Ed.
