Image by Ivan Walsh via Flickr.
Though I’m not a gamer, I read recently about the new print-on-demand, subscription-only, ad-free World of Warcraft magazine, published by Future Publishing through an exclusive arrangement with Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind WoW.
This magazine demonstrates some key concepts that I think will be critical to the future of print magazine publishing:
- A reviewer at Ars Technica comments that “The cover is heavy, glossy, and the art is beautiful. This is something you want to pick up and read; it’s nice to have a print magazine in your hand that doesn’t feel immediately disposable.” Today’s magazine readers want an experience that’s more than just mere content delivery; the Internet can provide that. The tactile feel and distinctive look of a print magazine offer something special.
- The sense of being part of “something special” is amplified here because the readers are already members of an existing community (numbering in the millions) that provides them a strong sense of identity. Reading this magazine builds upon that identity and reinforces it, making their buy-in to the magazine and the game mutually productive.
- The ad-free content implies a certain purity and genuineness that ad-supported magazines rarely can offer. Readers won’t feel that their chosen identity as dedicated WoW gamers is somehow being played upon to sell them other products. No ads also means more room for quality editorial content.
- The print-on-demand model, as I recently addressed at MediaShift, is cost-effective for the publisher, reducing waste and inefficiencies inherent to the usual magazine distribution model. Additionally, as an executive involved in the project told Ars Technica, the publisher can monitor exactly who is subscribing, making it possible to target the content more precisely to an evolving readership.
One drawback to this publication is that its nature as the “official” publication of WoW may mean that its editors are overly reliant on WoW for information, and have difficulty maintaining the independence of their content. This characteristic, though, is probably somewhat unique to the WoW situation. Other magazines that follow the keys of this model outlined above would be less likely to have that potential difficulty.
It’ll be interesting to see whether this project succeeds. If the WoW community – a group dedicated to regular Internet use that is accustomed to ease of information access online – can be drawn to support a print product as well, then this model will have demonstrated its feasibility.
