Moscow Times
August 26, 2009
Dacha Magazine Sales Soar In Crisis
By Nikolaus von Twickel / The Moscow Times
Media executives looking at business opportunities in Russia this year are dreaming of an unlikely place: the dacha.
With advertising budgets and readers’ incomes slashed by the crisis, the country’s magazines and newspapers are suffering together with media worldwide. Accordingly, revenue and readership numbers are down for many of Russia’s nearly 25,000 print titles.
But while newspapers are among the hardest hit, with weeklies losing up to 15 percent of readers, magazines about family, children, health and cooking are reporting strong growth.
According to a TNS Gallup survey, nationwide readership for family and health-related titles rose 16 percent from 5.3 million people in the five months to April 2008 to 6.2 million in the same period this year.
While the figures are telling of what readers want in times of economic hardship, they can be also taken to point to Russians’ apathy toward politics.
After all, the country’s daily papers’ already dismal readership figures are sliding further, with daily papers losing 17 percent of their readers between April 2008 and April 2009, according to TNS Gallup.
Just 9.6 percent of Russians read dailies between December 2008 and April 2009, the survey said. By contrast, daily papers in many European countries reach more than half of the population, with Germany’s figure standing at just above 70 percent.
Analysts said the trend reflected the fact that while Russians do not like political news in general, they have a strong distaste for negative news.
“When I am sitting on the bus and answer a phone call about politics, people around me fall silent,” said Alexei Makarkin, deputy head of the Center for Political Technologies, a think tank.
“The news these days is mostly about unemployment and other negative things, and people are irritated. They do not want to read that,” Makarkin said. “How to keep my dacha and gardening is much more attractive.”
Publishers beating the trend are betting on a new format focused on where Russians feel most at home: The out-of-town vacation home commonly known by its Russian name, the dacha.
Magazine titles like Moya Prekrasnaya Dacha (My Super Dacha) and Dom v Sadu (House in the Garden) have topped the latest subscription statistics, with orders for the second half of this year jumping a whopping 3,024 and 387 percent, respectively, compared to orders for the second half of 2008, according to data published by the Press Distributors’ Association.
While industry insiders warned that the figures were not representative because both magazines were launched only last year and subscriptions usually account for just a fraction of print sales in the country, one of Russia’s biggest publishers said there is a bright future for consumer- and advice-focused journalism.
“People want advice in times of hardship,” said Arnd-Volker Listewnik, CEO of the Russian division of Burda, the German publishing giant.
He said the dacha segment was promising, even though its market share was probably less than 10 percent.
“The dacha has always been a central place in Russians’ lives,” Listewnik said in an interview at his Moscow office Tuesday.
Dom v Sadu, which Burda Russia launched in March 2008, has jumped to a print run of 500,000. “And it is still growing,” Listewnik said.
He said the magazine was making 90 percent of its revenue from sales but suggested that advertising would grow significantly when the print run breaks 1 million.
Like its rival Moya Prekrasnaya Dacha, published by the St. Petersburg-based company Press-Courier, the pocket-sized magazine is sold monthly for a thrifty 10 rubles (30 cents).
Both focus on straightforward advice for the “dachnik,” be it on gardening or health, and they share a model that is wonderful for publishers’ costs and dreadful for journalists they are mostly written by readers’ themselves.
Burda calls this “interactive,” and Listewnik said it is an example of the Internet influencing print. He said health topics were even more attractive, with an overall market share of up to 15 percent of the national audience.
Burda launched a similar 10 ruble monthly magazine called Domashny Doktor (Home Doctor) in September 2007, which by now has an official print run of 580,000.
Listewnik suggested that the health titles were popular because there is so much room for improvement in a country where male life expectancy is below 60. “Russians are only discovering healthy living for themselves,” he said.
The TNS Gallup survey also shows that the country’s major business publications are also suffering significantly, even though it has been suggested that readers demand more information about the economy in times of crisis.
Figures comparing the five-month period from December 2007 to April 2008 and December 2008 to April 2009 show that Moscow-wide readership for all major business dailies is down, with Kommersant sliding from 140,000 to 109,000 and RBK Daily from 81,000 to 62,200.
Vedomosti, which is published by The Moscow Times’ parent company, Independent Media, slid from 103,700 to 87,100, while The Moscow Times fell from 46,100 to 40,400. (TNS Gallup only polled Russian speakers for the survey.)
The Moscow Times publisher Ekaterina Son said the figures reflect the fact that readers have been drifting to the Internet for some time. “The fact that many readers in the financial sector lost their job has reinforced this,” she said.
At the same time, readership of women’s and fashion magazines remained relatively stable, dipping from 16.7 million to 15.8 million, according to TNS Gallup.
In what might be cold comfort for those concerned about the future of the country’s higher-brow journalism, entertainment magazines are suffering even more than newspapers. Readership was down 34 percent from 8.7 million between December 2007 and April 2008 to 5.7 million between December 2008 and April 2009, the survey said.
Burda’s Listewnik explained that this was also connected to the crisis. “Readers find stars no longer that interesting,” he said. “The oligarchs are too busy consolidating their wealth, and there are far fewer parties.”
