Link: Magazines Gussy Up Web Sites to Court Ad Dollars.

Yes, it’s true. Online ad dollars are about to exceed magazine ad spending.

If you’re a magazine, this is bad news.

Magazines have lots of people and postage and printing costs. Magazines depend on traditional advertisers buying ads that are essentially unmeasurable, and doing so because they always have.

Everything is different on the web.

There are no incremental costs. People costs are much lower. And most of all, the ads are totally measurable.

2004 and 2005 are the years that the magazines of the future were/are born. And those magazines are unlikely to be print publications that figured out how to make it online. Instead, the new winners will be publications that figured out how to do what this medium is good at, instead of trying to protect a dying medium instead.

If I ran a traditional magazine, I’d figure out how to build a permission asset, how to enable dozens of blogs (some amateur, some pro) and how to embrace adwords, asap.