SmartMoney and Money Print their Final Issues
Back in 2012, SmartMoney, the personal finance magazine from the Wall Street Journal, announced that they were ceasing print production and moving to a digital-only format (which later merged into Marketwatch). In 2019, Money magazine printed its final edition as well (moving to digital only and then selling to Ad Practitioners LLC).
This leaves only 1 personal finance print-on-paper magazine – Kiplinger – down from a high of 8 magazines at one point.
I was a Smart Money subscriber a number of years ago, but the content became very watered down (particularly vs. Kiplinger), so I completely lost interest and unsubscribed.
I’ve remained a Kiplinger subscriber since around 2004 because they still produce really good personal finance and investment content. At roughly $2.50 per issue with a subscription, it’s well worth the investment, even though I could click 100 times and get it all online for free.
Beyond that, I’ve had a special connection with Kiplinger – they have previously rated 20somethingfinance.com as one of the 10 best personal finance blogs and the best personal finance blog for twenty-somethings. I’ve also written online guest columns for them.
I’m concerned about the future of the personal finance print magazine, and so are they.
The Print Business Model
In today’s print industry, there is a vicious repeated pattern of decline that looks something like this:
declining ad revenues -> declining content quality -> declining subscribership -> more declining ad revenues -> repeat -> death
Kiplinger is still around because they’ve put a roadblock on #2 by maintaining quality content. They’ve also built out a nice website, in Kiplinger.com.
But like any print industry executive today, Kiplinger’s now-retired former Editor in Chief, Knight Kiplinger, expressed concern about the industry,
But advertisers—whose support is vital to all media—don’t seem to acknowledge the print audience of which you are part. They are abandoning magazines at a steady pace, apparently believing that they can reach you more effectively on Web sites, including ours. I think they are missing something. There’s a special bond between quality magazines and their readers. What do you think?
It’s true – advertisers are abandoning print for digital. Can you blame them? A full page ad in a print magazine can cost from $40 – $80 cpm (cost per 1,000 impressions). Meanwhile, a banner ad on the web can cost $3 – 4 cpm (20X cheaper). Print has stubbornly stuck to their high prices. Is a print ad worth 20X the price of a digital ad? It’s hard to make that case when digital offers more transparency metrics like actual impressions, clicks, and actions taken after the click, while the direct impact of a (very expensive) print ad can be extremely difficult to measure. Blind faith is costly at $80 cpm, even if it comes in a sexy full page format.
The print industry’s profits have never been about subscription revenues – they rarely cover the cost of production and shipping. So when their other revenue source flees, print has a big problem. It starts that vicious cycle. A while ago, I championed why I still unwaveringly subscribed to my local newspaper. Just a few months later, after quality content declined and they raised their subscription price for the third time in a year, I unsubscribed. The only advertiser dollars they had left at that point was from local auto dealers.
Like many who grew up with print, I still like holding a print publication in my hands. I get excited about pulling that magazine out of my mailbox every month. And I’d love to see Kiplinger continue its print publication.
So, Mr. Kiplinger, I do not hold an exact answer on how you can make that happen, but I would imagine it would need to include the following:
- first and foremost, maintain your journalistic quality
- embrace and invest fully in your online medium – the digital trend is not reversing, and readers can tell when online is an after-thought
- Make your print ad offering more competitive with digital
- encourage your digital and print staff to encourage and embrace the conversation online and enhance their digital footprint
- so long as ad revenues exceeds costs, maintain print to help feed your online viewership and ad revenues
I, for one, hope you succeed.
Print Magazine Discussion:
- Were you a Smart Money or Money Subscriber? Were you sad to see it go?
- Do you subscribe to Kiplinger?
- What’s your feedback for Kiplinger, moving forward?
I currently subscribe to Kiplingers. I enjoy reading the articles and like have a physical magazine in my hands as opposed to reading it online or on a tablet. I saw the editorial that you quote in this months edition. I’m hoping they can find a keep the print version going.
Agreed. I was given a subscription to Kiplingers as a gift and really love it. As someone who spends her whole day on front of a computer screen, it is nice to come home and read from a print magazine at the dinner table or elsewhere.
Consumer Reports has an interesting model too – pay $25 per month for their ad-free print magazine, and an additional $20 or so for their ad free website with most of their content available.
Correction: per year, not month!
Thanks for the correction, Said to myself I want her income, lol….
I have always found the Kiplinger newsletters most informative. Their content was very up-to-date and insightful.
While I have an e-reader, I still prefer to read paper. I understand why it’s going away though. You can bring costs down that way. The “greenness” of going digital instead of paper is far, far overrated though. Instead of using paper, which is a renewable resource, we store the information on intensive mainframes which emit CO2 like nobodys business. Of course, no one likes to hear the truth.
I like Kiplinger. I enjoy reading the magazine and being able to tear out a page that is relevant for me and my needs.
Online is great–but I won’t sit for 1 hour reading online. I will with a magazine in hand.
Times change, and I see Kiplinger changing to meet that need. But fundamentally, people have to WANT to learn about their finances and WANT to change. Kiplinger can help you do that. But if you have the entitled mentality–Kiplinger is too bold for you.
Thanks for the kind words about Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine and Kiplinger.com.
Everything changes with time and so it with the printing and the cost of it. Kiplingers personal finance magazines are quite beneficial and important stuff for every kind of people, it shows the way of managing the personal finance and planning the budget with present income.
Now that Money magazine has announced it is going out of print, there’s only Kiplinger’s. Let’s hope that the acquisition of Kiplinger’s by Dennis Publishing will endow it with the resources to remain a high quality publication that can also continue to grow and evolve digitally.