‘Absolutely beautiful’ future for B2B publishing?
Jinfo Blog

18th August 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Business-to-business journals are the information manager’s staple diet, and they’re starting to innovate. A new report suggests that interactive periodicals are due for lift-off, and e-readers could be the catalyst. It was LiveWire’s Penny Crossland who drew attention recently to Haymarket’s new B2B web magazine Windpower Intelligence, which pulls together content from a variety of sources and delivers it to subscribers according to their preference (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e30210). Now American publisher Thomas has launched Manufacturing Executive (http://www.Manufacturing-Executive.com), a paid-membership online community for leaders in manufacturing worldwide. Running alongside the conventional advertising-funded controlled circulation Managing Automation magazine, Manufacturing Executive claims to be ‘turning around the traditional media model’. The industry, not editors, will create most of the content through articles, forums, blogs and a crowd-sourced Experts Exchange. Aimed at industry leaders, who will pay $249 annually, it will be editorially moderated, although a Manufacturing Leadership Council will determine the editorial hot topics. Members will also receive the bimonthly Manufacturing Executive Journal, a conventional professional publication partly modelled on the Harvard Business Review (http://digbig.com/5bcess and follow About Us links). Could the melding of conventional publication and interactive communities represent the future for B2B publishing? A study for the Next Issue Media digital publishing consortium, conducted by Oliver Wyman, suggests that subscriptions to interactive titles could be generating $3 billion in revenue by 2014, thanks largely to e-readers. According to the Wyman findings, among owners of e-reading devices, the availability of interactive editions at the point of renewal, at the same price as today's print editions, drives a nine point increase in the overall subscription renewal rate, from today's 55% industry average to 64%. What’s more, 30% of renewing subscribers choose a bundled print and interactive edition, perceiving the two formats to be complementary (outline at http://digbig.com/5bcest or download the white paper from http://digbig.com/5bcesw). The findings tend to vindicate News Corporation’s view that devices such as the iPad are a game changer (see Penny Crossland’s LiveWire posting at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e30216) – certainly for consumer publications, but likely for B2B offerings too. Manufacturing Executive Journal may be conventional in terms of its content and publishing model, for example – but a Thomas’s spokeswoman told BtoB Media Business that its digital edition would look ‘absolutely beautiful on the iPad’ (http://digbig.com/5bcesx). It remains to be seen whether e-readers really do achieve the widespread use on which such developments are predicated – but B2B publishers are certainly not going to sit back and allow the decline in their readership to continue. Such a proliferation of delivery media, further enriched by the growth of interactive communities round specific B2B titles, is likely to present fresh challenges to information managers long accustomed to acting as the gatekeepers of their organisations’ access to the trade press.

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