It has been a phenomenal year for me and Landscape Juice which has seen my readership figure rise by one thousand two hundred percent.
From June through to August the numbers stayed pretty even but September has broken through resistance and is again into blue skies.
There is a a hidden message here I feel and it is not one that is welcomed by gardening magazines and maybe even a few of the early web one websites; the message is that the tipping point has been reached and magazine figures will never return (if they are anywhere near now) the height of their popularity.
I notice that Horticulture Week has seen a drop in subscriber numbers (although the naughty devils have not updated their advertising page with the new figure.)
Last year the ABC figure for Hort Week was around 9,800 but has dropped to 9,500 this year although we cannot ascertain from the ABC figures who reads the magazine.
Web surfers are in denial and the use of the Internet has become so much part of our daily lives that we have got to the point where we do not realise how much a search engine is used in our daily lives.
If I asked a selection of people in London on a busy day the question - Give me a brief history of sunflowers - and promised a brand new luxury car for the winner, how many of them would go to the bookshelf and look through an encyclopaedia for the answer and how many would pop the question into Google?
The only way that paper magazines can survive is by completely monetising their on-line version, raising readership and giving advertisers value for money then give away the paper version.
Do you think I am wrong? wait another three to five years and I will ask you the question again.
Advertisers are getting a poor deal in a magazine because they can only be on the one page. With Internet advertising, if an advert is in a front page side bar, it will appear on all pages of that site.
One little thing, and Hort Week need to consider this, is that over ninety percent of traffic will enter the Landscape Juice site through a search result. Very few will come to the front page and then follow a link to somewhere else because they may have been searching for a particular topic.
For example, a gardener who has a lawn covered in leaves may ask for tips on clearing leaves and the search engine result will take the enquirer to the page on Landscape Juice with the information (try it, Landscape Juice has been coming in the top three results since I posted the article last week out of 6.4 million returns).
Now Hort Week have an Article titled Calibrachoa and if I was to search on this they would not come up in a search result unless the link is on the front page at the time of the search because the search engines cannot get past the front page.
If I wrote a post titled 'Tips on growing Calibrachoa' I can almost, almost guarantee that Landscape Juice will return the top result as quickly as within the day and very often within the hour.
The challenge for magazines turning to the net is, can they make the transition fast enough to save the day and plug the financial gap?
Further reading: Is the Horticulture printed publication industry in deep trouble?
and: Paper versus Megabytes the future of printing over pixels, what is your take?
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