Magazine publishers, already reeling from a slowdown in advertising and circulation, have gotten slapped with word that a major distribution company is about to jack up the rates it charges to deliver issues to retailers.
Anderson News earlier this week informed publishers that it would impose a 7-cent charge for each copy of a magazine that it delivers to stores, and warned that any publisher that refuses to pay the fee could no longer count on Anderson to distribute its magazines.
Go to the New York Post for more on this story. While the magazine distribution model is different here in Australia, I’d expect distributors to be looking at revenue opportunities from publishers. They are chasing revenue from newsagents through (sometimes but not always) distributing more product they know will not sell. One distributor is working on a book model. Another distributor has started promoting potato chips.
Be sure to read the whole Post article, especially about returns and retailers paying only for scanned sales.
Newsagents need to look seriously at their situation around magazines. Making money only off of what sells does not work for many titles. Our network is our asset and unless we start to price access to that others will make even more from this.
Mark,
Thinking about this I would propose a ‘per item’ charge. Any other would not solve the oversupply issue.
Industry-wide adoption of these proposals would certainly cause many publishers to seriously re-think the number of copies they supply.
Confident publishers with strong-selling titles shouldn’t really have a problem with paying an additional per item charge. although here in Thailand I reckon more than half the magazines will disappear if this ever happens.
Lets start with something like $0.01 per item. Once we get that working then lets get an independant rview done on what the value really is.