Sunday, 22 April 2012

Contemporary Challenges to the Magazine Industry.


There are a many problems that can have an impact on the magazine industry, they are: New Technologies, Illiteracy, Distribution costs, Environmentalism, Recession, & Division of Advertising.

New Technologies

New Technologies are very challenging for magazines today, because of the advance in new technologies the sales of magazines have started to drop. In the new day and age you’re able to download and read almost anything online, and because 90% of magazines are aimed at younger audiences aged 10-25 ish, and the younger generations today aren’t interested in purchasing magazines and reading, and would rather be using social networks and playing video games. Personally in my own class room only about 25% of the class actually read a magazine regularly however the majority of the class did have a social network and/or enjoyed playing video games. And because of this, a lot of advertisers have decided to start changing where they’re going to be advertising to social networks and games instead of magazines, this in turn could cause the cost of magazines to go up because they’re getting less money for advertising space, and this would raise the price of the magazines, making it even less likely to get people to purchase them. To help deal with this change, a lot of magazine companies have started releasing E magazines for tablet PC’s and computers, and creating websites to be able to catch up with the ever changing market.

Illiteracy

Illiteracy is a very common problem with society today. And magazines are obviously very heavily with the literacy, even though they contain a lot of images, they’re mainly literacy, many people find a lot of writing very uneasy and puts them off of bothering to start reading the magazine, some magazines have a big lack in pictures as well, because of this a lot of magazines are starting to go out of business, so they’ve started adding more pictures onto the magazines, so that they are more appealing to the younger generations, this can be very troubling for the magazines, as it limits the content the magazine will be able to publish

Distribution costs

As we hit a rougher time in the economy, it has become more expensive for magazine companies to produce and dispatch all of their magazines to the thousands of stores all across the country. This is because of a few contributing factors, such as the cost of fuel increasing, this increases the costs of distribution, so the overall cost of getting the magazines out to the shops increases, the rise in fuel costs also increases the cost of paper, as it’s more expensive for paper to be dispatched. Another reason that the costs of the products would go up is because of printing, printer ink is a very expensive, which makes the costs of the magazines themselves to go up in price, and even if they only cost an extra 30P per magazine, the company prints thousands of magazines at a time, and the cost then skyrockets, causing the shop price of the magazines to go up, which in turn makes people less likely to buy a magazine If it’s going to cost them a lot of money.

Environment

The impact that we humans have on the earth is a great concern for the people of today. Magazines as a media product consist as a lot of paper, varying on all the different sizes or magazines, Although some of the magazines produced today are relatively small in the amount of paper that they use, there’s still thousands of them being produced, and magazines are passed around a lot, so eventually they’re put into bins, instead of being recycled, and used again for magazine, this causes an impact on the environment. One way in which we were able to come up with as a way to combat this was if shops offered any discounts on magazines if people were willing to bring in their old magazines to be recycled, this could help greatly with the environmental impact of just dumping the magazines into bins, and could make the stores have a larger profit by selling on the paper to be recycled and turned into new magazines,

Recession

The economic level in the England lately has been very low, this has made it very hard for people to get jobs, particularly younger people. And without a job, people aren’t earning money, and without money people are cannot afford to purchase luxury items. And people are also being made redundant in the recession, so they’re losing their jobs. One way that the magazine company could help combat this problem would be if they were willing to lower their prices a bit so that the magazines could become more affordable; however they would have to keep the prices high enough so that they wouldn’t start to lose money.

Division of Advertising Budget

Advertisers today have to be smart where they spend their money, as they would want their advertisements to reach as many people that they can, so they would have to start advertising their products somewhere where a lot of people who would fit into their target audience would go or see it, such as on a social networking website, millions and millions of people browse social networks on a daily bases, and many times a day, advertising there could increase sales of the business vastly.


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