February 2010

Media M&A Report 2010

The Year of the Distressed Deal is how 2009 will be remembered by most media buyers and sellers.

Top Deals of 2009

Bonnier’s Buying SpreeBuyer: Bonnier Corp.Seller: Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S.Price: N/ADate: June 2009

2010 can’t be as bad as 2009, can it?If you’re talking about mergers and acquisitions within the publishing space, it certainly could be. According to the Jordan Edmiston Group, there were 615 transactions worth a combined $32 billion in 2009....

Private Equity’s View of Magazine Publishing Not What it Used to Be

The Magazine Industry saw private equity-fueled acquisitions grind to a virtual halt in 2009.

Evaluating and Valuing Online Properties

While digital content properties were once a popular acquisition target for publishers, more recent trends indicate technology companies, especially those that can provide a non-ad dependant revenue stream, are the flavor for 2010. Accordingly, performing due diligence requires a hard...

Getting a Deal Done

In the wild and fast days of 2007 when a record number of media deals were closing at record valuations, the acquisition process was well-oiled by massive amounts of debt at very favorable terms. Now, however, that very factor has...

Face Up: Flow Control

MAGSTATS

Staying Clear with Your Publishing Mission in a Transformative Digital Age

For all the shiny new toys on display at last month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas—from apps for everything, to TV everywhere, to e-readers that make breakfast—the scene was stolen by the one that wasn’t there: Apple’s breathlessly anticipated...

Web 2.0: How to Get What You Don’t Pay For

Let me take you on a journey back in time… It's the late 1990s.

Q&A with Meredith Corp’s Jack Griffin

Meredith Corp. was one of the few bright spots for publishing media in 2009, with a tale of sliding (but stabilizing revenue) and increasing profits.

Surviving a CMS Migration

A few years ago, migrating content to a new site wasn’t a huge deal. Most publishers had a limited amount of content on their site and it was primarily text. Today, that same site may house thousands of files including...

Breaking New Accounts

Expanding an existing Client’s buy is always more cost efficient than landing a new account. However, as clients scale back print (and increasingly, all aspects of their budgets), landing new accounts has become more vital than ever.

Magazine Production’s New World Order

The magazine production department used to be about tracking insertion orders and hard-copy ad materials and shipping by hand all of the magazine pages to the printer. These days, with so many automated tasks and so many different and growing...

Signs of Life for Print?

Only 18 consumer magazines posted ad page growth while total ad pages fell 25.6 percent in 2009, according to Publishers Information Bureau.

Building a Business Intelligence Group

If “platform agnostic” was the dominant publishing catch phrase of the last five years, “business intelligence” could dominate the next few as publishers move beyond core publishing duties (such as generating content and selling advertising) to offer more agency-like services,

Magazine Paper: The Outlook for 2010 and Beyond

While 2008 and 2009 saw a significant drop in paper pricing, there are a lot of underlying factors that could reverse the trend in 2010, including paper manufacturers decreasing their production, changes to the tax credits the paper industry receives...

$300K+ in New Revenue: Intellisphere’s Conference 360

In a market filled with big names such as the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association, medical publisher Intellisphere has created a way to break through with custom edit and marketing packages wrapped...

Multi-Channel Audience Development

Every new line of business publishers pursue—e-commerce, lead-gen, and so on—inherently requires a certain degree of cross-platform selling and conversion. In other words, as publishers expand their product platforms, so go the opportunities to grow overall audience numbers.

The State of Brand Auditing

In recent years, auditing bureaus ABC and BPA Worldwide have been working to offer ways in which members can offer advertisers more complete views of their brands. ABC introduced its Multimedia Publisher’s Statement for consumer magazines in 2008 and b-to-b...

Build Your Audience With Information Marketing

Whitepapers, case studies and advertorials strengthen bonds with existing customers and capture new prospects, too. Because this material is considered educational and editorial rather than promotional, readers are less skeptical that they’re being sold to and are more receptive to...

Capturing Highly Targeted Leads

In March, Canon Communications launched DeviceLink.com, a site for the medical device industry. One of the popular features is the supplier directory, where users are able to contact any of the 14,000 suppliers. However, suppliers wanted to see more qualified...