Boys Life Magazine Maintains its Commitment to Print

Warren Young, the publisher of Boys Life magazine, called me today to talk about the possibility—in fact, the lack thereof—of getting tablet version of this venerable publication.

Boys Life is 100 years old this year, and I wish them a very happy birthday.  They have 1,100,000 subscribers and close to four million readers.  That represents a value to advertisers that, in the analysis of the publisher’s team, would be diluted by the introduction of a tablet version.

“Print is something we take very seriously,” Young told me. “We take seriously the power of print to change lives.”

Boys Life, full of stories of everyday heroes who have changed lives themselves, has inspired generations of boys to become heroes themselves.  You can find in its pages information and stories about the survival skills that have saved people’s lives.  And the publisher asks the question:  the mastery of which skill is more important to a person’s life, to a person’s survival:  swimming—or literacy itself?

Boys Life has both bases covered.  Adults who had early reading problems write in to tell how the pleasure of reading Boys Life each issue helped them overcome those problems.

And the magazine’s advertisers are part of that.  Tony Hsieh, author of Delivering Happiness, founder of LinkExchange, and CEO of Zappos.com has, for example, connected his early interest in the field of mail order advertising to his experience reading Boys Life. 

How does this relate to the publishing decision to shun the tablet version, at least at this time?

“It is important to our advertisers to be present in print,” Young told me.  “Print has a stickiness to it; it’s here today and here tomorrow.  And it has, at least for Boys Life, a huge degree of pass along readership.  For every one subscriber or newsstand buyer, we get three other readers.  Everyone who buys a print copy of Boys Life represents four readers.”

That  value to readers and advertisers is not something that the publisher is willing to risk compromising with a digital version.  “It might be—it is—cheaper to get a digital version to market,” Young said.  “But it doesn’t fit in with our business model.  We intend to keep delivering to our four million readers and our loyal advertisers the experience of print.”

At 100 years of age, Boys Life is still available to readers through subscription and on the newsstand.

Just not, at present, on a tablet.