A new trend to be witnessed in the consumer magazine segment is the increasing interest shown by online media companies in acquiring traditional print magazine brands. Such companies are aiming to achieve higher growth by digitizing such print magazines which will open up a much wider segment of the market hitherto impossible with their print counterparts.

There also are several successful instances of the above where media companies have struck gold after releasing digital copies of well known print magazines. There is the Mel Magazine, Popular Photography, and Car Bibles that have been re-launched in digital format by Recurrent Ventures to help boost its digital ad business.

Then there is Future which pushes around $1 billion in sales from its e-commerce venture. The company says it owes much of its success to acquiring and digitizing print brands. As Axios reported, it recently acquired Dennis Publishing which owns such print titles as The Week and PC Pro in a deal worth $416 million. Other digital titles it owns include The Week, Marie Claire US, and Kiplinger.

Similarly, there is Outside which has several outdoor enthusiast brands under its belt. These include the likes of Women’s Running, Backpacker, and Peloton Magazine. The company also said it has about half a million subscribers for its digital magazines along with around a million subscribers for its print ventures.

All of this also points to a readjustment of sorts for the magazine industry that could lead to several titles driving into oblivion though new things are expected to happen as well. In any case, making digital editions of existing print titles are far easier than it used to be in the past thanks to a well established digital ad infrastructure now available and which was virtually non-existent in the past. Ad revenue from digital and print titles too has hit parity, something that again wasn’t the case in the past.

So does this point to digital being the future for print titles? Well, that does seem to be the case as of now.

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