Brochure Printing In Danger of Collapse
A massive dip in the amount that readers in the UK are spending is of great concern to media publishers and printers alike. In the first six months of this year consumption of traditional media, such as newspapers and magazines dropped by over 19% and spending on subscription to online magazines plummeting by an incredible 48%. With readers flocking to free online versions of newspapers and magazines, publishers are finding it difficult to persuade readers to buy the physical medium.
With the popularity of online holiday sites increasing, there has been a steady decline in the demand for the glossy holiday brochure printing, and so the prospect of publishers reducing actual magazine numbers is not a pleasant one for the printing companies that hold those contracts. The outlook for print material is bleak. In a survey undertaken by YouGov, which polled over 1000 consumers, found that only 9.8 % would consider paying for any type of media, real or electronic, in the coming year.
The news worsens, when this group were further queried, less than one third were prepared to pay for news media. Overall this means that only 3% of those surveyed will consider becoming new customers. The two media that people were more prepared to pay for were music and film. News Corp hoped their decision to charge for the online version of both The Times and The Sunday Times would recoup some of their losses, but the simple fact is that generic news is much too freely available to expect many people to pay for it from a particular source.
The only areas where charging for online media is acceptable, are for specialised or copyrighted material. Even this is going to be available to those who know how, torrent download sites for example (though this is more often used for the illegal download of audio or video files). One type of reader who seems to have remained loyal to physical media is plane, train and bus commuters. There were a number of reasons cited for this, laptop battery wear and patchy mobile broadband being the most common.
While companies looking to promote their products will continue to offer work to flyer, catalogue and brochure printing companies, they will be looking for the most competitive rates, so squeezing the profit margin of the printers even further. In the current economic climate, people are going to be reluctant to fork out for material that they can access at no cost.