Turbulent times for Yachts & Yachting

by Jeni Bone on 31 Aug 2009 The ongoing financial and circulation strains prevalent in the marine magazine publishing world continue, symptomatic of a global decline in the ad revenues of print mastheads.

Two weeks ago one of the icons of British magazine magazines, publisher Yachts & Yachting Ltd. was put into administration.

Primarily UK dinghy-focused, the magazine and its website occupy a narrow niche in the world sailing scene. The magazine was published twice a month until last September, when it shifted to monthly. At the time the CEO reported this had been a very successful move, releasing figures on 'the new, bigger and glossier edition of Y&Y', claiming a 60% increase in sales and healthy subscription rates.

But actions of the past few weeks have shown the reality was another story.

A management buy-out, led by magazine editor, Gael Pawson and website editor, Mark Jardine and a financial partner suggests the magazine and website will survive with a greater emphasis on the website, which is the largest sailing news site in the UK, but small by world standards but the successful transition has yet to be proven.

As the shift continues from long cycle print magazines which delivers sailing news months after an event, to online coverage, which is same hour or same day, online publications are dominating in the readership stakes.

As a result, sailing mastheads worldwide are rushing online, however, as many publishers have discovered, magazines and online news are completely different beasts. Print dominance does not deliver an automatic ramp to online success.

In the online sailing world, the two largest sites are the US-based ‘Sailing Anarchy’, which has a very successful and active online forum, and the Australian-based, Sail-World which has US, UK, European, Asian, New Zealand and Australian geo-located news sites and advertising.

Interestingly, neither of these groups has evolved as a spin-off from sailing magazines.

They had not depended on print incomes to grow and prosper and now lose and they've discovered how to build an online audience not in a month or six month but over the best part of a decade, while many magazine spent much of that time preaching that the web would never matter.

Of course this is not just a marine magazine problem. Around the world, newspaper and magazine publishers are struggling with a fall in advertising demand and the problems of a structural migration of classified and display advertising online.

In Australian publishing behemoth Fairfax Media has reported an AUD$380.1 million full-year loss after, suffering a 40% drop in ad revenue.