Converting from paid to controlled
After a constant struggle to maintain a paid base, Rogers's Profit decided to convert to controlled (or, rather "request") in the fall of 2002. Doug Dingeldein, the group circulation director at Rogers, said that controlled books "are not about the increase of subscribers but more about serving the market." Translation: our advertisers like this.
Kerry Mitchell, publisher of Profit at the time of the decision said: "Controlled circulation is a strategy to ensure highly qualified distribution for a vertical title. Profit's controlled distribution allows us to deliver very specialized content to our target market; the leaders of Canada's growth companies." Translation: our advertisers like this.
The newsletter article said the net result for Profit was that readers-per-copy (RPC) improved by more than 30%. This seems to contradict the conventional wisdom that controlled books should have RPCs considerably lower than paid.
The article also implied that, while postal subsidies are not quite as generous for "request" circulation like Profit, the magazine made up for it by saving the cost of acquiring new readers.
posted by D. B. Scott at
12:20 am
1 Comments:
Dave Livesey is a great guy, and very smart, but he IS a circulation designer and magazine aficionado, not a circulator. He did an OK job of reporting, but there were aspects of his Circulator article that could be a bit misleading from a circ standpoint.
To my knowledge (and according to the latest CARD I have handy, from 2002), only about 20% of Profit's circulation was individually paid. Some significant bulk-paid/group arrangements boosted "paid" by another 50%, so total paid circ was around 70,000 of 100,000 total.
But I suspect most of the efficiencies of cutting back on the high acquisition cost of paid circulation relate to pursuing individual paid readers (subs and newsstand), not bulk arrangements.
In particular, the statement "It is for this reason [the postal subsidy on request controlled] that many publishers of controlled magazines insist on their desire to receive the magazine, even if it is free" is problematic. The postal subsidy on request controlled is so new (within the past year or so, although discussed for some time before it came into being), and the overall publising economics (of non-request controlled vs. request controlled) almost certainly dwarf the impact of the postal subsidy ... so I doubt that very many publishers have chosen to pursue request circulation primarily due to the postal subsidy.
In the greater cosmic scheme of things (and this is a very broad generalization), an individually paid reader is still "higher quality" than an individual-request controlled reader, which is probably "better" than a bulk-paid reader, which is in turn "better" than a NON-request controlled reader. I suspect that Profit has strengthened their emphasis on individuals rather than bulk and non-request, and that's good, but I think describing it a wholesale switch from Paid to Controlled detracts from the underlying situation.
But I could be wrong. I don't work there, eh? I just mind other people's business. [grin]
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