Teen People magazine folds in print, stays on web
Teen People magazine, plagued by declining revenue from advertisers withdrawing money from the print world, is closing shop with the September 2006 issue. That follows the closing of the print version of ElleGirl earlier in the year. ElleGirl also continued the Internet version of the magazine.
Read more about it in the AdAge article at http://adage.com/article?article_id=110736 and that's open for public reading for a few more days.
Teen People subscribers slipped from 1.6 million in 2003 to 1.5 million in late 2006 and ad pages had dropped by nearly 15 percent this year.
TeenPeople.com will continue because it shows "promise and growth" according to the Time, Inc. owner. That's the same path taken by ElleGirl.
You can visit Teen People at http://www.teenpeople.com/teenpeople/ and ElleGirl at http://www.ellegirl.com/ to see the future of online teen magazines.
The shift from print to web, of course, isn't limited to teen girls. Major newspapers like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal continue to review their future in print while they bolster their online versions as more people use websites to stay up to date with news events. WSJ has nearly 800,000 paid subscribers to the online version now. Expect that number to grow.
And that reminds me that my latest Newsweek print issue was very thin indeed. Same news, fewer ads.
No grand predictions here but the marketing message seems clear. The shift of resources from print to website communications will continue. We'll have to wait and see where it stops.