A very interesting article here on whether digital publication of a magazine cannibalises the print sales. Well, according to this article, it does. The statistical methodology looks robust and the assumptions valid. Even though the time horizon is a bit old, I still do think that the results will get worse, not better, for magazine publishers.
This needs a wholesale change in the business model of print publications but I do not think that the market has settled down hard. I wrote earlier about how the media market is changing and my initial ideas but i dont think we know where life will take us.
Daniel H. Simon and Vrinda Kadiyali, The effect of a magazine's free digital content on its print circulation: Cannibalization or complementarity?, Information Economics and Policy, Volume 19, Issues 3-4, Economics of the Media, October 2007, Pages 344-361.
Abstract: We examine how offering digital content affects demand for print magazines. Using a searchable website archive, we measure the digital content offered by a sample of US consumer magazines from 1996 to 2001. We find strong evidence that digital content cannibalizes print sales. On average, a magazine's print circulation declines about 3-4% when it offers a website. However, the effect varies with the type of digital content offered. Offering digital access to the entire contents of the current print magazine reduces print sales by about 9%. We find no evidence that digital content complements print magazines. These results are robust to including controls for unobserved magazine, category, and time effects, as well as controls for the impact of contemporaneous price changes and other factors.
All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!
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