Popworld mag goes down the dumper

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Only 9,000 sales out of a print run of 130,000. Ouch.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6571291.stm

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I would LOVE to know more about how they did their research. 80% off in sales volume predictions is really STAGGERINGLY awful. And they spent a year on it! So they must have been getting fairly strong green lights most of the way along the process. I get the impression that media launches are real back-of-a-fag-packet stuff, research-wise, compared to the effort that goes in to putting out a new toothpaste variant say.

[/job]

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

I have absolutely 0 clue about media launches, but to be that far out smacks of total incompetence. That or everyone is bored by Klaxons already.

[ms-bracken.livejournal.com]

I'm really not sure that the Popworld brand of silliness could ever translate that well to print -like you say, the whole thing smacks of amazingly poor research and a general misunderstanding of the brand [/job] (and consequently what is good about the TV show). I had a read of it in the newsagents this week - I was waiting for a train, bored, didn't have much money and am a fan of Popworld. This, combined with 16-24 year olds and focused on indie, pop, rock, emo and R&B made me about as solid a target market member as they are going to get and really... it was incredibly poor, just witless, scrappy coverage. The fact that it was coverage of bands I largely liked didn't matter -they didn't seem to have grasped that people who enjoy watching Klaxons thumb wrestle of a Saturday morning will not necessarily want to read Klaxons interviews from the BARRY SAYS school of music journalism.

In conclusion I have never been so glad I didn't spend £1.50.

[darkpigeon.livejournal.com]

When it's done properly it works [/job]

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Actually when did Simon and Miquita leave?

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

That's a very good point. About a year ago?

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

almost exactly 1 year ago (see related article on that BBC page)

What staggers me is that they were expecting to, um, pulp over half of the copies of the launch issue. Is that normal for mags? No wonder we have a global environmental crisis on our hands.

[martinskidmore.livejournal.com]

That's not uncommon - they'd have been hoping for maybe 70% sales, but would have been happy with 50%. You are taking a guess, and one thing you very much want not to do is not put enough copies out. Subsequent issues are much more accurately targeted, and returns plummet fast.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Something does occur to me: from the MySpace page, it looks like a v.tenuous brand extension, the overlap between acts-on-program and acts-on-list being v.small. If it had been an actual straight-up-pop mag, it might have faired better.

[getbacknow.livejournal.com]

Yeah, a nu-Smash Hits would have filled a void and perhaps have sold more...this, however, was unnecessary on so many levels.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

is this not just "14-25 yr olds be not buying print media"?

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

I would have thought the chaps doing the research would have noticed that if it were the case, but I could be wrong.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

well they are a capricious lot yr 14-25s, they might happily say "yes mr marketer, yr magazine looks delightful and i would buy every issue" and then be like botherd when they actually have to spend £1.50 of their fag money on it, innit...

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Sales volume research assumes automatically that something like 3/4 of the people who say "ooh yes I'll buy that" then won't. (It varies by category).

It's worth pointing out from experience that when dealing with new products and launches a hell of a lot of the time the people commissioning the research will just outright ignore it though! It might be that the research people said "This will bomb" and the backers just said "No it won't".

All the completely horrible and stupid products you see on the shelves are more likely a result of them being someone's pet project, or an R&D department wanting to look busy, than the research getting it wrong. Research gets it wrong in lots of areas but sales volume predictions are one where it's more often OTM.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

defensive, much ;)

no, i agree, why would anyone try and launch a music mag for that demographic in this day and age, it seems entirely counter-intuitive...

[koganbot]

Tom, you might be interested in this NY Times piece that Dave linked over on Cure For Bedbugs. Has a really interesting analysis of why consumer markets will always be unpredictable: You generally only get very well-known if you're slightly well-known first, and what gets you slightly well-known is idiosyncratic and somewhat random.

Of course, this doesn't explain the Popworld train wreck, given that you had something that was known. And bad writing (I assume ms_bracken is OTM here), would explain why it bombs in its second, third, or tenth week, but not why it crashes coming out of the gate.

If you're not signed up for NY Times they might not let you in - that isn't predictable either - but registering is free. However, in a few more days this piece will go over to Times Select, and that's something you'd have to pay for. If you have trouble accessing the piece, I'll email it to you. The piece is written by Duncan Watts, one of the men who conducted the original study; I'd read a number of news accounts (two or three or four) of the study when it originally came out last year in Science - I think one of you linked the Guardian coverage from poptimists - and (1) not one of the accounts gave a comprehensible account of Watts' procedures (which Watts was able to do in a couple of sentences) and (2) not a single one mentioned the point that Watts' considered most significant: that the fact that we influence each others' taste makes popularity somewhat random and hard to predict. The accounts stalled on the idea that listeners are influenced by other people rather than just by "quality" - if I recall correctly, the Guardian dope was using it to "explain" why Ashlee gets better sales than McCartney, not realizing that the piece applies to all popularity, Beatles and Beethoven as well. (No one's saying that "quality" has nothing to do with success, but rather that people pay attention to what other people are paying attention to, so popularity tends to clump around certain items. This applies as much to The Test Of Time as it does to new product.)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I'd need to re-read it again to actually understand the experiment they did (though I've read about it before).

Another current hot theory in research - which goes against this I guess - is "predictive markets", the idea that a large enough sample is a good predictor of things, but an even BETTER predictor when the sample is itself acting as a predictor, i.e. "What will you like?" gets you an OK result, but "What do you think other people will like?" gets you even better ones, and even BETTER better ones if there's something 'at stake' i.e. if you present it as a game.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

ie the LEAGUE OF POP

[lockedintheatti.livejournal.com]

I've seen the research - it did not say it would bomb, it was very positive. Or, at least the spin that was put on it was - there's a good chance the marketing people just cherry-picked the good bits, which as a former media researcher used to really piss me off, and is partly the reason I got out of research! Unfortunately I appear to have deleted it otherwise I'd send it over.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

They would have yes. Anyway 14-25s are buying print media: they're buying Zoo and Nuts and Heat and Closer. They're not necessarily buying print media about music, though - and why should they? They have media available where they can get all the music they want and actually hear it.

Which isn't to say that Popworld Pulp couldn't have succeeded modestly but:

- shit name
- disconnect with brand values
- brand in decline anyway

[darkpigeon.livejournal.com]

They buy Kerrang! don't they?

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

launching a new magazine now is madness. i've not even heard of the publishers Brooklands, http://www.brooklandsgroup.com/magazines/index.html

i bet it was an ENORMOUS punt along the line from someone with the cash who just really likes the show! a year plus a million quid - i've heard worse magazine failure stories. but not many. and there ARE loads.

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

(they look like a packager for usually B2B stuff from that site)

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

*facedesk* Who the fvcking hell thought they were capable of doing a music magazine?

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Mind you I suppose it wasn't Emap at least.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The B2B mag sector is reportedly doing really well!

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Staggering numbers but I'm not terribly surprised. I already thought that print mags of all kinds had been having a fairly difficult time for the last 10 years or so, and for music publications, surely it's just been 2 decades of almost unmitigated carnage? Who in their right mind would want to start one now?

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

reckon if they'd broken 10,000 they might have continued. in fact it seems with the poor circulations of mags generally that 9000 isn't all that disastrous, though i'm not paying for the development. printing 130,000 first run does seem like a terrible idea.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Reasons for failure:
-People do not want another NME, one NME is bad enough. No matter how good the magazine is, people will judge it by its cover and that cover looked exactly like NME.
-Needs more actual pop.
-Actually tbh I think that cover may well be one of the very decisive factors in having killed it. It needed to be a really striking image, a la the Justin-in-handcuffs thing they did for the popworld one-off thing x years ago or at least something that said 'hello, actually interesting articles'
-Is never a good idea to just slide a new magazine into the racks; should have launched on a stand or something to make it stand out.

I was probably their prime demographic, being twenty with an interest in music and a fondness for magazines. When it was originally mentioned I thought it looked quite good and figured might as well give it a go but I didn't even buy it. It just looked fucking boring.

God one of the Klaxons is ugly.

[mcarratala.livejournal.com]

The process of mag creation via market research (not saying the researchers are to blame) notoriously ropey – Heat was something like five years in the pipeline and the launch was still a total fiasco – only nimble adaptation to favourable circumstance (the arrival of Big Brother) saved the day.
Despite the general gloom, publishers are launching magazines – esp weeklies – furiously (and closing them down just as enthusiastically). It's the business logic of the moment... may seem mad, but there you go.