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Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Print Media....?
This month's edition of Exhibition News falls plumply onto my doormat, and whilst browsing past all the photos of drunken industry faces at an awards dinner I noticed that this edition didn't contain a single advert from any of the recruitment companies.
That's not to say the book was any thinner - there seemed to be loads of pages taken up by people trying to sell and promote their venues, contracting services and other ancilliary bits and pieces. But no job adverts at all - in a magazine that a few months ago carried little else.
Now, of course there are fairly clear reasons, with an oversupply of candidates and a rather drastic undersupply of permanent jobs being the main two!
But given all the talk about the "structural" factors behind the decline of print media and the "social" changes in the way we consume content that can work against magazines and newspapers, there are still some even more basic facts of economic life hitting publishing owners as well.
If there are no jobs, there's no recruitment advertising. And that's - at a guess - 20%+ of your revenue stream turned off at the tap, instantly, overnight, irrespective of the hit taken by reductions in volumes from your other categories of advertisers. That's got to hurt - and I can't see many show organisers coping with slicing another 20% off their revenues right now, on top of the hits they are already taking.
Exhibition organisers are already counting themselves lucky that they are only suffering the effects of recession, and that our business model is far more immune to substitution from other media than our unfortunatel colleagues in print.
But maybe we should be counting ourselves doubly lucky that the exhibition business model has never been any good at delivering for the recruitment market - or we'd be in real trouble right now!
That's not to say the book was any thinner - there seemed to be loads of pages taken up by people trying to sell and promote their venues, contracting services and other ancilliary bits and pieces. But no job adverts at all - in a magazine that a few months ago carried little else.
Now, of course there are fairly clear reasons, with an oversupply of candidates and a rather drastic undersupply of permanent jobs being the main two!
But given all the talk about the "structural" factors behind the decline of print media and the "social" changes in the way we consume content that can work against magazines and newspapers, there are still some even more basic facts of economic life hitting publishing owners as well.
If there are no jobs, there's no recruitment advertising. And that's - at a guess - 20%+ of your revenue stream turned off at the tap, instantly, overnight, irrespective of the hit taken by reductions in volumes from your other categories of advertisers. That's got to hurt - and I can't see many show organisers coping with slicing another 20% off their revenues right now, on top of the hits they are already taking.
Exhibition organisers are already counting themselves lucky that they are only suffering the effects of recession, and that our business model is far more immune to substitution from other media than our unfortunatel colleagues in print.
But maybe we should be counting ourselves doubly lucky that the exhibition business model has never been any good at delivering for the recruitment market - or we'd be in real trouble right now!
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