Reader's Digest

The once-beloved magazine is making news today as it files for bankruptcy protection. As a die-hard fan of Readers' Digest at one time, this might have come as a sad news to me...just about a decade ago, but today, I am simply happy that something is going wrong in the house, for it gives them a reason to take a closer look at who they really are, and fix some of the basics.

The magazine has become just a bunch of crap, from what it used to be 10-15 years ago. I used to love reading RD in my grandpa's house, in fact it formed an important part of my initial literary sojourns, as I am sure was the case for many other adolescents. One of my first expenses when I started earning in India was to subscribe to RD. I had a bad experience with it with so many insert-advertisements, sweepstakes invitations by mail, and lots of irrelevant, completely nonsensical content including interviews with Bollywood damsels! I thought to myself, maybe RD India has gone to the dogs, and the mother-ship would still be intact. Again, when I came to the US, I started subscribing to RD. and found it to be incorrigible! In one copy, I counted the advertisement pages to be around 30% of the book itself! I canceled the subscription after a few months.

There was a time when RD wouldn't even take advertisements, they did a huge readers poll just to start advertising, that too only small unobtrusive ones...from there it has been a steady decline, driven by sole objective of profit making, give your address for subscription and you start receiving all sorts of crap.

I guess, in the magazine industry, there are clear choices, you either go down the advertising path, add on subscribers just to shore up your numbers and make all your money from advertising and other activities (like selling the subscriber base contacts etc.). One good example of this in India was Business Week that gave away the subscription for next to nothing, but you get a lot of ads. And most of the time, these magazines are just "just another" magazine on the desk, you never craved to read it, you never waited for it in the mail, leave alone the thought of preserving one!

The other path, the more courageous one, that made great magazines like Readers Digest and National Geographic was to focus only on building a highly loyal subscriber base and meeting their expectations over and over, being always careful not to annoy them in any way. These were the ones you cherished, you wanted pass on those articles to your family and kids, you tried to preserve these for the future, the whole experience from subscription to reading to preservation was a joy in itself-this is precisely what RD and its owners failed to understand.

The result?

U.S. circulation at Reader’s Digest plunged 14 percent last year to 8.31 million from 9.68 million, compared with a drop of less than 1 percent for the top 10 magazines, according to Magazine Publishers of America.

I might be just the right sample for Readers' Digest, they charged me a subscription fee of $10 for a year and then sent me crap which made me cut that to an expense of just about $3. Instead, if they had charged me double of that ($20) or even more ($25), without the associated advertising crap, I would have still subscribed to the magazine and remained loyal-I have discouraged some of my friends too from taking a subscription; a business can probably do just fine without a loyalist, but an active terrorist is a dangerous proposition :).