Men’s Magazines In An Online Era

Eoin McSorley, editor of Dennis Publishing’s online magazine Monkey, discusses men’s magazines in light of our increasingly voracious online habits…

Back in the mid to late 90s, when Mens magazines were cutting an arrogant swathe through the newsagent’s shelves, magazines embraced and exploited how men were using the internet.

This was back when it was acceptable to email jokes that were three paragraphs long, and pictures of people grinning beside a road sign on Shetland that revealed the village of Twat was a mere three miles away were all the rage.

Magazines could do in print what you could see online and a harmonious relationship existed with content-sharing as part of a largely unchallenged illicit affair.

Now, more than ten years later, our online consumption is constantly changing. Jokes and pictures aren’t enough to sustain this relationship anymore.

Today, it’s all about broadband and video. We are constantly bombarded with moving images and sound in everyday life and that’s where our magazines will go too.

The net has left print behind in search of a new younger, more modern bedfellow. Your colleague, who was sending you pictures of an obese man in Speedos and a party hat ten years ago, will now be sending you mpeg files and YouTube links of a video of an obese man in Speedos and a party hat.

He’s innovated and the market has to also. Only now, there are thousands of videos out there, the reader can’t possibly filter that much information, so we have to do it for them.

Now, with eight out of ten connections in the UK being via broadband we are spending more time on the net than ever and consuming more in a shorter period of time. We’re listening to music, watching films, uploading videos and instantly commenting on each other’s work in a way that seemed fantastical even five years ago.

So where are the men’s magazines heading in light of this? The strong brands already have successful websites to offer their new media content.

Monkey has now moved this on and we’re dealing with the way men are now consuming the media and shifting with that change in the men’s magazine landscape.

But it’s not enough to just launch a website anymore, that relies on consumers remembering to visit your site and searching out your new content.

By coming to them via email you firstly make your delivery day an event and emphasise to your reader that he is part of a genuine online community absorbing and sharing the content with thousands of other people at the same time.

Five years ago mens magazines were easy to define, print propositions offering a combination of girls, cars, humour, sport, fashion and gadgets.

Monkey has, very quickly, altered the landscape, moved with the times and offered what is traditional content in a new 21st century way. Magazines have come to life.

Traditional mens magazines won’t die, they will evolve. We are all competing for one thing: time. TV didn’t kill radio and DVD didn’t kill cinema. The delivery and distribution of content will always evolve, re-invent and improve.

Online magazines have to engage quickly, deliver, hold interest and innovate constantly. The reader knows that he can go elsewhere with a flick of his index finger, so in order to hold his attention we must provide him with everything the web has to offer in an easily digestible, manageable format.

We can act as a filter for all the great stuff out there. We save our readers time, bringing together the funniest videos, the best movie trailers, first looks at games and the most amazing user generated content we ever thought possible.

Essentially, we find the great, brand new content from the dark, deep recesses of the web because our reader is way too busy to do it himself. That’s service.

The page turning mechanism of Monkey has been instrumental in the way our readers get the excitement of what the web has to offer with the familiarity of a traditional magazine. It’s truly a hybrid bringing the best of both worlds.

The evolution of online magazines is essential, readers will be less tolerant of a formulated product that doesn’t change on the web, because they are experiencing innovations all the time elsewhere.

Online magazines have to reflect this. Positively, that gives us the impetus to look at how we’re doing things constantly and change in ways that traditional print magazines would be wary of.

We’ve found that our readers will spend 45 minutes reading Monkey and that 93% like the format, they’re affluent with an average salary of £28,000 and upmarket; 65% ABC1C.

Over two thirds of our readers don’t read a men’s monthly or weekly so obviously we can offer those people who have left the men’s market a new and exciting way of getting the content we know they enjoy.

Monkey is at the cutting edge of the next stage of men’s magazines. And, with our ABCe of 209,000 per week, it looks good: men are coming to us for innovation and new ways of looking at a traditional features mix.

Men will always consume their media voraciously, what the print and now digital weekly market shows, is that how they do it will change forever.