Did Podcasts Contribute To The Decline Of Magazines?

 Between 2019 and 2022, total audiences for magazine companies decreased by 38.56 percent, according to wordsrated.com. Print magazines have been losing readers for several decades. Legacy publications such as Entertainment Weekly, Health, National Geographic, and countless others have gone from cultural icons to neglected antiques to admired from afar.

Consider how far magazines has declined from the top of the cultural zeitgeist.

 By 1970, LIFE was “America's 'favorite magazine' with over eight million subscribers.” Furthering the data, LIFE had an estimated pass-along rate “of four to five people per copy; each issue reached as many as 40 million people.”

People Magazine once had a readership of 46.6 million adults in 2009, the largest audience of any American magazine. But by 2018, its readership significantly declined to 35.9 million. The shrinkage was happening and there was no way to stop it.

The prevailing wisdom is the rise of the internet led to the downfall of print magazines. But is that conventional wisdom true. In the teenage years of the internet, we were all lead to believe that information would be at our fingertips. Just a search box away? 

What we did collectively experience, however, is that the internet is less than superhighway and more information gridlock. Data, information, news, gossip, and disinformation was served up to users as haphazardly and randomly as possible.

Yet podcasting, for all its decentralized structure, still organized topics, genres, categories, passions, hobbies in a manner that made access and visibility much easier than internet searches where success is based on your ability to craft a Boolean string or use advanced search functions (date, file type, location…“all of these words,” “exact phrase,” “none of these words,” “only results”) to generate a search result.

After all, when we were told to Ask Jeeves in the mid-90s, users discovered that the search engine had a concierge feel but was decidedly self-service with its answers.

Did podcasting, with its unique ability to narrowcast to incredibly fine-grained niche audiences, also contribute to the declines of print magazines? 

Certainly, Apple with podcast ecosystem categorized by genre made discoverability relatively easy. Although general interest magazines made the biggest splash -- Time, Newsweek, Life, Look -- it was the niche subject magazines that acted as the heartbeat of print magazines. Periodicals like Vogue, Better Homes And Gardens, Entertainment Weekly, Popular Science, and many others drove a reliable and stable subscription base.

 Let's consider how the niche aspect of podcasting rang the death knell for many magazines.  

Are you a science geek? No need to read magazines such as Popular Science, Scientific American, or Discover. Instead, you can listen to a wide range of superb science podcasts such as Science Vs, Unexplainable, Taboo Science, Short Wave, and Great Mysteries of Physics. 

How about music magazines? In the golden age of such periodicals in the 70s and 80s we enjoyed Rolling Stone, Vibe, Crawdaddy, Creem, NME, and Spin. 

Without such music periodicals, audiophiles can listen to terrific music podcasts such as Switched On Pop, History Of Rock Music in 500 Songs, Slate's Hit Parade, and Song Exploder. If you enjoy music from cultures around the world, fans can listen to Spotify:Mic Check, which focuses on international musical artists.

Some magazine publishers have adopted an "if you can beat 'em, then join 'em" strategy. 

People Magazine, for example, has a popular daily podcast called, oddly enough, People Every Day with the effervescent Janine Rubenstein. To its credit, People also broadcasts Radio Eye, which is a reading service for people who are blind or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material. People Magazine is an hour-long reading of the magazine, broadcast on Sunday.

National Geographic has been productive with its Overheard series, which began in 2019 and has tackled such diverse topics as uncovering Greek myths, telling tales of Amazons, fearsome women warriors, exploring how war can’t stop a scientist determined to uncover humans’ path out of Africa; and a deep dive on where musical genius comes from, and how do we know it when we hear it?

Further exacerbating this trend from print to audio is the recent addition of the video component to podcasting with YouTube. Now, podcast fans can see an African elephant, or a new fashion trend, new design trends, or even James Webb Telescope images deep into our universe.

Of course, any transition is not without its weaknesses, imperfections, and stumbling blocks. First, since magazine subscriptions are essentially a Gen X / Baby Boomer habit, transition to a podcast based on the same niche topic may be diminished since podcast fans reside mostly in the under 40 crowd. 

Second, print magazines in their heyday were an established, financially thriving industry. For example, in 2006, People Magazine had a circulation of 3.75 million and revenue that topped $1.5 billion. 

 No podcast can touch that revenue stream. 

 

In fact, still to this day, most podcasts that deal with niche topics at the granular level (podcasts about art historians, Bob Dylan cover songs, advertising campaigns, and narcissism) deliver high-quality content to their targeted audience yet must work extremely hard to monetize their skillful efforts.

Consider that the Serial podcast captured a few million listeners over the course of a multi-episode season. Compare that to the Sports Illustrated (SI) Swimsuit Edition when, in 2005, the swimsuit issue brought in an estimated $35 million in ad sales, which was seven percent of Sports Illustrated's annual revenue. The swimsuit issue traditionally sold more than one million copies on newsstands, which is about 10 to 15 times as much as regular SI.

Podcasts are ascendant yet still have a long way to go to match the cultural touchstones of iconic magazines that captured the attention of a majority of the population.

It's evident that print magazines can still survive if their business owners can blend print with digital, audio and video, and develop a value-added subscription model. 

Finally, it's interesting and ironic that a podcast would release an episode about the death of magazines and the birth of its heir apparent. Slate's Decoder Ring podcast recently released an episode about bookazines, where host Willa Paskin begins, "Magazines have fallen on hard times. 

The revenue from magazine racks has plummeted in recent years, and many magazines have stopped appearing in print or shut down altogether. Yet, last year, over 1,200 different bookazines went on sale across the country. They cover topics ranging from Taylor Swift, Star Wars, the Kennedy assassination, K-pop, the British royal family, the career of retired movie star Robert Redford."

To summarize, did podcasts precipitate the decline of print magazines? I think the answer is yes and no. No, in that print magazines would have been swept into the cultural slush pile even without the advent of podcasting. Yes, because one overriding strength of podcasting is its ability to identify and serve niche markets too narrow for most media companies. It was that niche focus that enabled podcasts to supplant print magazines in topics such as design, entertainment, gossip, history, health, politics, science, and technology.

Still, I miss those days when you'd head into a doctor's waiting room and have a wide choice of magazines to choose from tables positioned around the room. 

Anybody remember reading Highlights magazine while waiting for the doctor to request that you "say ahh?"