I work for Consumer Reports. Of course I cannot speak for the organization, but I am at Consumer Reports because I care about nonprofit media, and I wish to share some of my thoughts about the state of nonprofit publishing including Consumer Reports’ position among its peers in nonprofit media.
This week Rubert Murdoch purchased media assets of the National Geographic Society, a highly respected nonprofit organization best known for anthropology, nature, and animal journalism. The purchase includes their magazine and video documentary trademarks. Commentators are talking about how National Geographic is no longer a nonprofit publication, for example at The Guardian.
Consumer Reports is one of the few popular media outlets left standing. I wish that being popular and nonprofit were a bigger part of the Consumer Reports brand, because there are only a few big nonprofits out there, and I would call Consumer Reports big. In my opinion, Consumer Reports has until the present made the public relations decision to be modest, and trusted that the relevant audience would recognize their authority without the organization doing much to describe itself. Even right now, it might be the most popular paid-subscription publication in the United States. I do not have the internal Consumer Reports’ numbers at hand, but at its height, I think we had about 8 million combined subscribers to the print and online editions. Right now numbers have dropped, but I am fairly sure that we have not fewer than 3 million print subscribes and 3 million subscribers to the online edition. There are a few things odd happening here – one is that many publications combine subscriptions to print and paper, and if CR did that, then we could claim 6 million subscribers. We have separate subscription lists – almost no publications do that – but in my view, we could and should because the information published is almost the same. If we did any kind of subsciption disclosure, then we could appear in lists like [http://auditedmedia.com/news/blog/2014/february/us-snapshot.aspx this industry report of the most popular American magazines] or Wikipedia’s article for “List of magazines by circulation“. It might be the case that from about 1950-1990 that Consumer Reports was the most popular magazine in the United States, and maybe even the world (unless there was some magazine in India or China with national distribution), but in my time at Consumer Reports I have never seen the subscription numbers framed in that way. It just has not been a priority for the organization. I regret that CR does not appear at all in rankings of magazines by popularity, because I feel that Consumer Reports is losing authority as people in newer generations forget the reputation that it held among older generations. Even with the current number of subscribers, Consumer Reports still might be the most popular subscription publication in the United States. The other contenders for that title have dubious counting systems – the AARP magazine mostly comes with membership to the organization, and not by an explicit request to subscribe. The Game Informer magazine is mostly distributed to anyone making a video game purchase at Game Stop, and again, not by a person making a subscription purchase. Better Homes and Gardens subscriptions are mostly at a discount (cheap or free) because that magazine’s source of revenue is mostly ads and not subscriber request. So if a magazine subscription is defined as someone paying full price for a subscription to a magazine, and not getting on a mailing list as part of some package promotion, then more people purchase Consumer Reports subscriptions than any other magazine. Or perhaps I am wrong or missing data – even with me working at Consumer Reports sometimes it is hard for me to understand our place in the industry, and perhaps I am misunderstanding something, but I think not.
Regarding other nonprofit media outlets – for media companies, both PBS and NPR are experiencing major corporate changes particularly as fewer people support their affiliate system and more people want to access their content online. Switching to online has been a major disruption for them, because people who would give to their local PBS/NPR affiliate during fundraisers no longer are doing that. This profoundly disrupts their operating model and content creation network. Nonprofit public broadcasting has a troubled future without major changes. The stability of PBS is important because it is the only major nonprofit television organization in the United States, and NPR is the only major nonprofit radio organization. I feel that Consumer Reports is comparable to these two as it is the major nonprofit magazine.
As a reminder – there are almost no noncommercial websites which get a lot of traffic. Among the top 500 websites by traffic as currently listed by Alexa Internet, only a few are at least somewhat noncommercial. Wikipedia and Archive.org are the true nonprofits, BBC, NIH.gov (National Institutes of Health), and the US Postal Service are government websites, IKEA and WikiHow purport to be commercial assets of charitably managed organizations. Nonprofit representation online is almost dead already, and what remains will shrink to make room for commercial interests before it will have a chance to grow again. Consumer Reports holds an Alexa rank of 1600, which is a success in some ways. The Pareto Principle says that for any group, 20% of the members will get 80% of the attention, and the other 80% of the member will get the bottom 20% of the attention. Wikipedia is the only nonprofit website getting any of that 80% attention share, and all other nonprofit websites will compete for that bottom 20% of public attention. I wish that online there could be nonprofit media synergy in which all the major media outlets – Wikipedia, PBS, NPR, and Consumer Reports – could collaborate somehow to mutual benefit in all media.
It is possible to be more popular only be being popular and I wonder if Consumer Reports has something to leverage. From some perspectives, Consumer Reports seems less popular, but phrased in other ways, Consumer Reports has a compelling background. Now that National Geographic is for profit, Consumer Reports is almost certainly America’s most popular nonprofit subscription magazine. It might also be the world’s most popular nonprofit subscription publication.
These are just thoughts. I am not sure.