Double whammy for business information publishers
Jinfo Blog

12th July 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Business to business publishing suffered a drop from 4.7% compound annual growth rate from 2006 to 2008, to just 1.8% in 2008, and the sector’s litany of woes is becoming wearily familiar. According to the Outsell B2B Trade Publishing & Company Information report for 2008, publishers are faced with users with ‘professional attention deficit disorder who continually switch sources and media’, and the sector is struggling to find new business models in the face of developments such as the growth of user and community generated business networking (purchase details at http://digbig.com/5baayc). Meanwhile developments continue to move at a far faster pace than an annual snapshot can keep up with. One of the companies profiled in the Outsell report is Reed Business Information, which its parent Reed Elsevier had to bring back onto its books earlier this year after failing to find a buyer (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e16562); now the Financial Times reports that it has succeeded in selling its travel publishing division, with one analyst suggesting that the sale could herald the beginning of RBI’s break up, since in the current climate it is hard to do anything but small deals (http://digbig.com/5baayd). Among other specialist publishers, the Financial Times also reported that banks were poised to take control of Incisive Media, which earlier this year licensed publication of its Information World Review title to Bizmedia. Although Incisive is still profitable, the FT reports that it breached the terms of loan agreements last December (http://digbig.com/5baayk). And Informa, owner of Lloyd’s List and of market research publisher Datamonitor, has now finalised its cost cutting exercise by establishing a new Jersey-incorporated and Swiss tax resident parent company, New Informa (background at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e20022). Its fierce economies will at least enable it to maintain profit levels (widely reported, including at http://digbig.com/5baaye http://digbig.com/5baayf http://digbig.com/5baayg http://digbig.com/5baayh). Finally, and elsewhere in business publishing, the recent enhancements to the classified directory site Yell are unlikely to do anything for its falling revenues and The Times reports that it is facing further negotiations with its banks over its debt issues. Local directories may indeed be facing some sort of renaissance (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e19169) but, as the Times comments, it may not be the established players who benefit, as small business advertisers move increasingly towards eBay and Google, and the advertisers that Yell lost in the recession ‘may never return’ (http://digbig.com/5baayj). New publishing models and the advertising downturn constitute a double whammy for established business information providers, and there may be little that professional information users can do at this stage except look on. By the time the dust finally settles, though, information managers will need to have established what has been merely opportunistic and where the genuine quality information lies.

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