Free Thai Magazines and Newspapers
Free magazines and newspapers are the hottest items in the coffee shop in 2008. DailyXPress, part of the Nation group, launched this free midget tabloid size daily newspaper earlier this year, and had all the Bangkok journalists together in one room on that day. Despite the small size of the newspaper, the impact is huge, and can be felt by the other newspapers and magazines, paid and unpaid. The “borrowed” and “repeated” articles in the DailyXPress are the same as the one we used to read in the Nation, but it is now easier to digest (in case you didn’t get it the first time you read else where). But people don’t mind though, we Thai like the glaring orange banner and juicy news.
The competition is fierce in the world of free news. GURU and BK magazines were the prominent players in the free market in 2005-2006, until many other magazines such as Viva and TGI Friday follows suit. As a reader, I felt quite overwhelm by the choices of what to read. There doesn’t seems to be enough time to capture them, so reliability in the distribution plays a key role in what gets read. And as a sponsor to these magazines, I feel the market share has broken up into smaller pieces, and require me to carefully choose the magazines to invest in. This is also because the number of circulation quoted by them just doesn’t seems to add up to the total number of readers anymore.
What’s the way forward for these free magazines? Will we visit the bubble burst like when there were too many magazines launched in 2004?
Free magazines are a very lucrative business. They earn a very profitable income from advertisements, (trust me I talked to the people running them.) Weekly magazines earns weekly income, daily magazines earns 7 times that weekly income! But of course, advertisements cannot increase forever to support the run of so many new magazines. The existing magazines will need to be qualitative and consistent in its content and distribution channel. As far as I can see, none has been able to achieve this standard, but it’s never too late.
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