The San Francisco Chronicle writes today about ELDR, Dave Bunnell’s start-up magazine targeting the 60-plus market. The piece captures nicely the recent trends in national print media for the Boomer market. However, I’d distinguish between a title like ELDR–which is testing the waters for a seniors lifestyle magazine–and publications targeting younger Boomers. The markets for readers and advertisers are different.

I’ve met Dave and his partner, publisher Chad Lewis, and have seen the premiere edition, which is sophisticated and well-crafted. However, ELDR faces several big advertising challenges. First, selling older audiences to advertisers is always tough, outside of certain obvious categories. Also, ELDR has launched with national circulation of 75,000, much of it unpaid. Selling that distribution strategy to big national advertisers is going to be difficult. National advertisers always prefer paid circulation–even with the growing acceptance of “free” media, e.g. the Internet. And a rate base of 75,000 probably will be too small for many advertisers, who tend not to look at anything smaller than 250,000.

Disclaimer: I’ve had experience in this market via the launch of Satisfaction, and my current consulting client roster includes companies (not ELDR) that are active in the 50+ magazine area.

Final note: thanks to Chronical Staff Writer Joe Garofoli for mentioning 50+Digital!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 7:44 am and is filed under Advertising, Marketing, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.