Lost Forest After Dark

Nothing brightens up the dregs of Winter in February like the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue. Guys can take their favorite sports magazine and check out the latest swimsuit fashions and exotic travel locations and dream of warmer weather that is at least three months away. The fact that there are shapely models in the swimsuits is an added bonus.

This year Sports Illustrated placed all of its Swimsuit issue photos online with easy-to-navigate links to photos by model and local. In addition there are videos and content that is not available in the magazine. These photos are available to all, no need to subscribe to SI, sign-up for anything, etc.

It’s obvious that Sports Illustrated gets the internet. Many magazines and some newspapers still try to limit their online content to subscribers and “premium service� payers. Obviously they are worried that if it’s on the internets for free, no one will buy their magazine. This is short sighted and foolish. First magazines have what is called portability: you can bring it anywhere. Although it is becoming much easier to lug notebook computers around, it will never be as convenient as a magazine. More importantly, the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue will be on newsstands for a month, the online content for much longer than that. If you check out the SI link, there is a lot of advertisement on the site as well. By not charging for the content, Sports Illustrated is ensuring that a lot more eyes will see those ads, and that is where the money is on the web.

The lesson here is that the internet is not going anywhere and is only going to be more omnipresent in the future. Content providers need to embrace the internet, use it to increase brand awareness of their publication and to drive eyeballs to their site and on-line advertisers. If you fight digital distribution of your product, you will end up like the music industry, becoming irrelevant to a large part of the culture-consuming population.