Wide Format Online and its two weekly newsletters will be celebrating their first decade of service to the wide format printing industry in the Australia, New Zealand and South Pacific island region this year and 2015 has been one of the most significant years to date.
Significant in that our newsletter database has now grown to over 15,000 industry folk from across our regional graphic arts industry. Probably and almost certainly, no other Australian and New Zealand print industry newsletter has reached this subscriber level. This volume of readers simultaneously generates a huge number of readers for the Wide Format Online magazine via the many links in the newsletters.
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| A screen grab of our latest Constant Contact Home Page showing the number of active contacts. |
Ten years ago, Brian Stickland, publisher of Wide Format Online magazine and its associated newsletters, recognised two things: 1) that the wide format printing industry was going to be huge and 2) that online publishing was the way to go, since the cost of printed magazine distribution was going to be far too prohibitive for trade magazine publishers to send out the number of copies that were required to effectively represent an industry. (Even ten years ago the cost of distributing 9-10,000 copies of a decent sized magazine was often more than the cost of the paper and printing.) The only way publishers could cope with the huge increases in distribution costs was either to ask subscribers to pay for their copies and/or hike advertising costs to new levels. Most trade magazines today are distributed free of charge and it follows that ad costs have risen whilst the number of copies being distributed by many trade publishers has fallen. Significantly 10 years ago most trade publishers had their distribution audited by CAB (part of the Audited Media Association of Australia), but not many trade magazines have their distribution audited today.
“It is a very sad scenario since nearly all my publishing life I have enjoyed the smell of new ink on a premium art paper. Publishing a printed magazine for the printing industry was a privilege,” says Brian, pointing out that, back then, the quality of a magazine aimed at the printing industry had to be of premium print quality. “Representing the print industry meant that our publications had to be the best. We realised that our readers would be our harshest critics so we always set our sights exceedingly high in terms of content value, production and print quality. In those days, we had won several awards for our magazines over the years.”
Brian’s publishing philosophy today is simply to give our readers what they need to build a better business.”
He says that a critical part of Wide Format Online’s growing popularity are the classified ads that appear in both newsletters (and the magazine) as these not only provide an important service to advertisers but they have also been the primary reason for the huge readership that we now enjoy.
“Our competitors carry classified ads but they tend to treat them as the ‘poor cousin’ of their magazines rather than as a major feature that generates readership.”
Like most other industries, innovation is key and Wide Format Online has had many firsts to its name. The most important is the focus on that one subject – Wide Format Printing.
“We will be celebrating our 10th anniversary at the end of this year and over the past decade we have built a huge following. We are the only publication that focuses exclusively on this subject and our readership, which initially started with the sign and display sector, has grown across the whole spectrum of the graphic arts industry (including the growing textile field and commercial print sectors) – areas where people are hungry for product information. They know only too well that wide format is a growth market and don’t need to be reminded repeatedly of this fact by the generic media,” concludes Brian.
Wide Format Online
www.wideformatonline.com.au
