Most of you know that?Med Ad News?has ceased publication, along with web properties PharmaLive and Pharmalot.?Med Ad News?had become thinner and thinner lately indicating slim ad sales. There is no doubt that printed magazines are hurting in general. The decision to end PharmaLive and Pharmalot also indicate it is hard to make money on content driven sites.
"The failure of?Med Ad News hurts us all." - Bob Ehrlich
The Internet has changed how we view information and what we will pay for it. On the positive side we can find an almost infinite amount of health information. On the down side, it is harder to figure out where to go for quality summaries of relevant information.?Med Ad News?had some great content on agencies, new product launches, performance of drug companies, and DTC. I will miss it.
Selling content on the web is extremely difficult. I rarely will pay for anything on the Internet. Those digital newspapers and magazines that require pay to read are not getting my money even at low rates. My reading style has evolved to be more of a scanner of information across a wide range of free publications. I read multiple newspapers, magazines, and trade sites weekly, almost daily. Broad search has replaced a reliance on in-depth reading of single publications. Mostly I get my local newspaper to do the crossword puzzle.
For those of us in the drug and device business, who are busy doing our day to day tasks, it is getting harder to sift through all the health content available. I get about 10 daily media and health newsletters. I cannot keep up with all that I am offered. The Internet has been a blessing and a curse. What printed magazines did was tell us what was important at least to their editors. Now we have to decide for ourselves what is important. The same can be said of television where we now get about 100 channels.
DTC Perspectives will continue to publish a printed magazine. We feel it is still desired. We do face the same cost of publication pressures as other trade magazines and are clearly aware of the challenges remaining a printed vehicle. As a quarterly we are not able to publish breaking news content, instead focusing on less time sensitive articles.
The failure of a major trade publication like?Med Ad News?hurts us all. There may be numerous alternatives with the same information, but we will miss it for doing a lot of the summarizing of hard to find data.
What is great about the web is it allows anyone to start a business selling anything and everything. The hard thing, however, is the competition created by ease of entry. So many entrepreneurs are entering the health space pitching products and content that it is getting hard to make the economics viable.
The Internet is eroding the printed information business, but it is also creating a flood of digital options. Failure is much more likely than success for new entrants. Health information businesses are easy to start because digital platforms are cheap. Getting advertisers or paying subscribers is the issue. That led to the end of?Med Ad News?and its digital companion publications. That is the likely future for many if not most of the trade publication world. Is it inevitable that we all fail? That is up to the readers and advertisers but it does not look good.
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