More on the future of publishing
Thursday, January 31st, 2008More on my Jan 28 post, Technology and the future of publishing.
If you look at the Alexa website rankings for backwoodshome.com and compare them to other, much larger, magazines in our area of interest, such as The Mother Earth News, you can see how the magazine playing field is leveling out.
In the print issue world, TMEN dwarfs BHM with about 300,000 plus paid subscribers to our 27,000. Same on the newsstand — we put out about 12,000 copies and they put out a gazillion. But on the internet, we are not that far behind them. For traffic to their website, they rank 15,548 in the United States compared to our rank of 29,207. That’s very good for a small magazine like BHM. Countryside and Small Stock Journal, for example, which is also much bigger than BHM, ranks 211,466 in the United States, while Back Home Magazine is ranked so low it doesn’t even register.
How I interpret this data (the data changes every few days) is that the internet provides a level playing field where quality of content is rewarded by traffic. TMEN’s economic clout has been largely nullified when it comes to competing against BHM on the internet. Part of TMEN’s higher ranking, in fact, is probably due to its name, Mother Earth. A lot of environmentalists and New Agers googling Mother Earth are bound to hit upon TMEN, giving it a higher traffic rank.
Another measure of website value is how many pages the average website visitor views on a given website. For BHM it’s about 3, compared to about 2 for TMEN. That’s significant. Countryside’s page views is about 4, which I think indicates it will begin rising dramatically in traffic rank. It’s an excellent magazine.
I’m not bragging here. I’ll wait until we surpass TMEN to do that. But I am providing powerful evidence to support my Jan. 28 post. The world of publishing is changing dramatically on all fronts.
