Why Bodybuilding Print Magazines Are Dead
I remember the days when I would wait impatiently for my magazine subscriptions to show up in the mail. It was similar to a kid on Christmas morning waiting to open presents and his parents were taking too long to get ready and come downstairs. I had subscriptions to Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness, FLEX, Muscular Development, and Muscle & Fitness. Every free second I had was spent reading one of the magazines I got in the mail. Then the whole cycle would repeat itself the following month. I simply couldn’t get my hands on enough fitness and bodybuilding magazines. Then, just like the dinosaurs, they’re all but extinct and just about all bodybuilding print magazines are dead.
Look at the magazines that are still in existence today. They are basically a brochure full of ads and no content. Why? Well, let’s discuss some of the many reasons why print magazines are dead.
Table of contents
Reasons Why Bodybuilding Print Magazines are Dead Today
Below are some of the reasons I believe bodybuilding print magazines are dead and never coming back.
1. Fish where the fish are
For starters, print magazines are dead because bookstores are dead. We had bookstores all over the place years ago. There would be a few in local malls, you’d have places like Borders and Barnes & Noble. Then they all slowly started closing. Barnes & Noble is the only remaining bookstore in the area of Pennsylvania that I live. People aren’t going into bookstores anymore – they’re shopping online.
With fewer people purchasing books and magazines, the locations that once purchased the issues, either stopped or went out of business. With fewer people buying magazines, print media companies couldn’t make enough money to keep their doors open and continue producing print magazines (which isn’t cheap by any means). Some ended up going to online digital subscriptions only, but even that has slowed down tremendously.
2. Not enough time to sit and read cover to cover
Maybe it’s just me, but with each passing year, I swear we get busier (or some people get lazier). No one “has time” to sit down and read a full magazine. We work long hours, we fit in our workouts, and with whatever free time we have left over we tend to spend it with our families. Heck, even local newspapers are going digital because people aren’t purchasing print issues anymore. You rarely see newspaper kiosks where you drop in your coins, open up the front and grab a paper. That’s saying something when people don’t want to sit down and read a newspaper that talks about things going on in their local area as well as around the world. The fact of the matter is that print magazines are dead and I don’t think they’ll ever come back.
3. Everything is online
Welcome to the world of digital. People buy ebooks, audiobooks, digital magazines, music downloads, etc. People aren’t going to the store to purchase hard copies of anything these days. No one wants CDs. No one wants paperback books. They want to be completely mobile with everything.
Society lives off of their smartphones and tablets. They take them everywhere. So, it only makes sense to give the people what they want. You either evolve or you die. It’s not really the fault of print magazines that they died off. Technology has evolved and everything went digital and can be stored on devices without cluttering up your home with a bunch of magazines, books, or CD cases. It’s just a shift in how we all live our lives now.
4. Free versus subscription
We are frugal. We don’t want to spend money on things that we can get for free. Information commonly found in magazines is no exception. We have access to just about every answer to our problems at our fingertips by a simple Google search. We type in our question, hit search, and we’re done. Problem solved.
Most people aren’t interested in paying for something that doesn’t concern them. Let’s be honest, not every page we’ve ever read in a magazine was something we wanted to read or found value in. There are boring interviews, content that doesn’t resonate with us, etc. So, if we can search for our questions for free, is there really a need to pay for a subscription to something that might not completely benefit us and be the best way to spend our hard-earned money?
5. Advertisers don’t value print magazines anymore
It’s called business. You can’t spend money on things that bring you zero in return. That’s a great way to blow through all of your money and go out of business. Why would a company advertise on a platform that won’t produce revenue for them? It just doesn’t make sense. Yes, there are still people spending money in print magazines in our industry, but those magazines are just about dead and gone. They were once well over 100 pages per issue, and they are a fraction of that now – and most of the pages are advertisements and no educational content.
Advertisers are spending their money on digital. They want to be online and all over to websites that are going to produce the most eyeballs. Brands are even advertising on websites that don’t even have anything to do with bodybuilding or fitness, yet it is still a better investment than spending it in print. Digital is also much less expensive than print ever was. Brands can save a considerable amount of money by making the switch. In addition, with social media, it’s easier now than it’s ever been to get your brand and message out in front of a broad audience either for free or for not much money at all.
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