You there, stop yawning when we start talking about personal finance. Especially this magazine.
The bottom was going to start shaking out of this category sooner or later. Keith Kelly's item today about this magazine firing their entire ad sales staff and outsourcing these services does not bode well for this perennial third runner.
* Personal finance information runs rampant on the web, from CNNMoney.com to Motley Fool to Yahoo! and countless others.
* Kiplinger's has the oldest readership of the personal finance titles and has failed to bring in enough new young readers, especially with all that stuff around for free on the web.
* Dated editorial direction from the early 90's.
* No discernible web strategy. They throw the magazine's content up on the web, so why buy the magazine?
ODDS OF SURVIVAL: 15%
Maybe...our sales to reception rooms were down 16% from 2005 to 2006.
I predict that Fast Company or FSB will be on the chopping block this year. In the business and money magazine category.
Posted by: Purplepeeps | April 06, 2007 at 02:24 PM
Hello, Mr. Reaper...Knight Kiplinger here. I am reminded of Mark Twain's quip, upon reading his own obituary in a newspaper: "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." A year after you gave us "15% odds of survival", Kiplinger's magazine is alive and well and showing the resilience of the pioneer that invented personal-finance publishing in 1947.
In the past year Kiplinger's has seen a 17% increase in total audience (spring MRI), compared with +10% at Money and +1% at SmartMoney. We're enjoying the largest increases in newsstand sales in the personal finance category. MRI reported Kiplinger's median household income ($102,000) to be second only to The Economist among ALL magazines it surveys, ahead of BW, Fortune, Barron's, and Forbes, not to mention Money and SmartMoney.
"No discernible web strategy"? LOL, as my kids say. Our 2008 Web ad revenue is up 162% over the first five months of '07, on a 54% gain in monthly page views and unique visitors (many of them younger readers just now discovering the wisdom of Kiplinger). Kiplinger.com just won a 2008 EPpy for "Best Business/Financial Web site" with under one million unique visitors a month (but now well over that), and we were a finalist for an EPpy as "Best National Magazine Web site," and a 2008 Webby honoree for "Best Financial Services" Web site. Kiplinger's Web strategy in the early '00s was to keep our powder dry while SmartMoney and Money lost many millions of dollars expanding too fast--money they won't earn back for years. Now we at Kiplinger are benefiting from surging ad spending on the Web, which is offsetting the demonstrable decline in print ad pages experienced by all magazines.
Mr. Reaper, it is myopic to view magazines today simply as stand-alone enterprises. At Kiplinger, our magazine is just one part of a valuable media franchise (founded on business newsletters) with growing revenue from the Web, custom publishing, sponsored DVDs, cable programming, audio conferences, etc. We're closely held, well capitalized, and we love our work as much as our readers do. Nuff said.
Posted by: Knight Kiplinger | June 12, 2008 at 05:45 PM