"I say this as someone who's spent years inside this world - building magazines, rebranding them, helping editors and creative teams hold onto the integrity of their work as the business structures around them fell apart. Before I founded In Real Life Media , I kept watching the same cycle repeat: print wasn't failing, but it was being abandoned by people who no longer believed it could evolve."
"As digital advertising rose, budgets were pulled from print quietly at first, then aggressively. But the money didn't go to publishers. It went to Google and Meta, who captured more than 60% percent of global digital advertising revenue at their peak. For nearly a decade, they took almost all the growth in the market, leaving publishers fighting over whatever crumbs remained."
"This was never true. Readers didn't turn away from print. Publishers abandoned the very things that made print valuable. They stopped treating magazines as cultural objects - artefacts of care, curation, and community. They watered down the thing that once built trust, and then were surprised when trust eroded. If you reduce any medium to the least expensive version of itself, of course it fails. That's not a prophecy; that's a business decision."
Decision-makers pulled budgets from print as digital advertising rose, with Google and Meta capturing over 60% of global digital ad revenue. Publishers lost growth and fought over remaining revenue. To survive, print was cheapened: page counts shrank, paper quality dropped, editorial teams were gutted, and covers were redesigned to chase short-term metrics. Magazines became thinner, glossier, and more cautious, eroding reader trust. Readers did not abandon print; publishers abandoned the elements that made print valuable—care, curation, and community. Reducing a medium to its least expensive version guarantees failure, and long-form editorial is re-anchoring print.
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