In the online world there is so much choice and competition for the consumers attention it’s difficult to guarantee an advertiser that their message will received as consistently and as powerfully as magazines. Nevertheless, the Internet is where the eyeballs are going and the opportunity for online publishers and fashion advertisers is figure out how to build “image” online. Yes “image”.

Time is also something that has changed dramatically online – it’s much faster and attention spans are much shorter. Many online fashion experiences try to slow down the internet consumer by making them wait for videos to load, click for more information, and read! Fashion is about “image” we need to allow consumers to view content at their speed. We also need to remove as much as possible cognitive brain functions like “click here”, go back, enter email address and get back to showing off the fashion range. Why? Because it’s the emotional response to fashion that we really want. Ever wondered why people get tired online – it’s because your cognitive brain is working overtime making decisions on simply how to navigate the web pages rather than actually ogling the content. We want people to love the fashion and get lost in it – not lost in technical Internet functions. Fashion is about the clothes and the image advertising creates. Most online sites showcasing fashion have not got that yet.

If fashion is to work online you need to show a lot of powerful big images quickly and give the consumer control over the speed.

That’s what I am doing with my website (www.stylehunter.com) and that’s what drama magazine in the UK are doing so well. Check out their Iphone magazine (www.drama-magazine.com). This is where online content is going and advertisers will pay for this.

Part of it will be for online ad rates to rise. Vogue has a circulation of a million readers a month. You can easily put together a few quality websites and blogs whose demographics and reach will be the same. You can track and measure with far more accuracy how many of those people engage with the ad, and to some extent even the effect that an ad has on things such as brand association for a general item, brand recall and other things that often happen before a click. Yet the prices for advertising online aren’t anywhere near what they are for a month in Vogue.

It won’t always be this way, but for the foreseeable future sites will max out around $30 CPM – if they’re very lucky, and very good at direct ad sales – while established magazines continue to bring in upwards of $100 CPM (American Vogue’s approximate rate).

Fashion is finally starting to get that while they may not be the same people who subscribe to Vogue, they can find an almost identical audience online at a much lower cost for a similar reach. And they’re FINALLY starting to stop with this lie that ‘their’ customer isn’t online, or won’t buy clothes without an experience, or will think less of the brand for being *gasp* convenient to their lives. Fortunately for advertisers, online publishers haven’t called them on this and continue to offer their audiences at a bargain.

As for solving the “problem” of free content, it’s a matter of thinking differently. Magazines are physical. You can touch them, hold them, sometimes smell them if a fragrance insert is running. People are used to paying for physical things. You can feel in a certain paperweight that it costs something to produce.

Why should anyone pay for pixels? Start there and you start to find an answer. Perhaps it’s compiling a depth of research or information someone can’t find through a basic Google search. iTunes compiled a library that was far and beyond what you could find on filesharing sites, and they offered reliability and quality. People paid for it. Or selling a physical product. I won’t get started on ecommerce stats. People buy things online, including high ticket items. They pay for these things. Or access to a person or people who are otherwise unreachable. LinkedIn has done well for themselves by charging for limited parts of their site. Ctrl+C [print], Ctrl+V [web] doesn’t and won’t work (jury’s out on mobile).

The sooner people give credit to the internet as a viable, yet different channel – and work with those differences instead of ignoring them or trying to change them, the more stable they’ll be in the face of change.

The cannibalization of advertising revenue by free online content is a problem for all kinds of magazines and newspapers and I have yet to hear a viable-seeming solution from anyone.
Actually, I’d point to Purple as an example of a magazine which has settled on one of the few viable strategies: create content people want to pay for, and keep it off the internet.
Consumers have gotten used to free content and unfortunately this is not sustainable.