Time Inc publishes close to 130 magazines every single month, including Sports Illustrated, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, Fortune, People, InStyle, Life, GOLF Magazine, Southern Living, Essence, This Old House, All You and Entertainment Weekly. The new SVP of Digital M. Scott Havens made it clear he wants to focus on digital in a big way, and not just publishing digital editions of the magazine.
In a recent interview in The Guardian he said ““We are not a magazine company,” he explained. “We are a media company with a portfolio.” Time Inc. staffers, please note this change when talking to relatives about your career.
“We want to build the next LinkedIn, the next Gilt , the next Facebook,” Havens adds. “We have got really smart people and we need to let them use their brains.” Such flattery is likely to go down well with his employees but it comes with a stark warning: “If they are not up for that then we need to bring in some new people,” Havens says.
One of the non-magazine aspects Time is working on is a series of videos. They are borrowing a page out of Conde Nastby developing original content. The company has 50 different series in development and will seek to monetize it. In fact Havens believes that the company could probably sell advertising against 500m video streams a month, more than six times its current total of 80m monthly streams.
It will be interesting to see if Time Inc’s digital strategy will play out. Haven has made it quite clear in his various interviews that you are either onboard with the new strategy or you can leave.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.