Magnus Greaves on The Rise, Fall and Rise of His Media Career
You sold the properties and most of the magazines have ceased publishing, correct?
Unfortunately, we actually ended up shutting the company down when the financial crisis hit. A couple of things happened. The advertising, obviously, dried up very quickly. The luxury market looked as if it wasn’t the best place to be with some people and then just the idea of celebrating the extensive earnings of Wall Street [didn’t seem ppropriate]. It wasn’t fun anymore.
Now was that surprising to you, because typically the luxury market is composed of people who can afford luxury goods. They buy despite what is going on in the economy.
There are luxury goods, and then there are super luxury goods. You know what I mean? You’re still going to wear suits, and you’re going to buy nice ones, but you know what? You might not take a G5 to Vegas for the weekend. So, we were kind of at the luxury and ultra luxury level. There was a time where people didn’t really want to be showing designer brands and indulging in luxuries publicly.
Was it difficult to shut the company down after putting so much time and effort into this adventure?
You know what? You just had to step back and take a look at it and ask ‘can this be fixed?’ ‘Can we ride it through?’ At that time you just didn’t know what the outlook was for the world. They were having emergency banking meetings and setting up trillion dollar stimulus packages over the weekend, so I didn’t know what could be done, who would step up and stand beside us. I think that is another lesson. When it’s over you have to say, “It’s over.”
Why didn’t you go back to trading?
Well, you know what? I moved on. I had a phenomenal run as a trader and as an owner of a trading business. I took some time. I was a couple of years removed from that, and I was really into the world of media and had ideas I wanted to keep pursuing.
New York Times described MyMag as a company you co-founded to “produce single-issue magazines that, instead of being dependent on advertising, were essentially marketing vehicles for celebrities with strong fan bases.” Describe how you came up with the MyMag concept.
I was working in the world of magazines and as an outsider I had a really different way of looking at the economic model of creating income in a magazine and it seemed really inefficient to me. The economics was kind of bazaar, but most of the industry accepted it because that is just the way that it was. What were they going to do about it? So, I was always trying to think, “How you could create a magazine and sell it and have it be a more profitable model?”
One day, I read the book about Google and all of a sudden it just hit me: there are all these amazing trends that are happening, and Google is sort of at the forefront of these digital trends; personalization, aggregation, targeted advertising. I just said to myself, “If I could bring those to the world of print magazines that would be a pretty amazing concept.” So I started to explore it, initially, from that point of view and then I realized that if people could choose their own content, it [wold allow] you to look inside that persons mind. That is when the real soul of MyMag came about and that’s really what MyMag is today.
We are really a company that is able to attract interesting taste-makers and work with them to extract interesting information in order for them to share that with their fans. Also, the magazine format is a good platform for us to do that because you can take content from other magazines, you can reprint text and images and create a story. Looking at digital trends and looking at the economic model of the magazine business led to it.
What do you think is specifically wrong with the profit model of magazines vs. what it is you’re trying to do with MyMag?
You have to remember; my perspective of the magazine industry was as an independent. But, if you were to look at Condé Nast, I mean, they have so much momentum and are such a big machine with such big brands in their umbrella and it’s still working for them. So, what I am about to say comes from the viewpoint of an independent, but if you were to go to the newsstand you’re supposed to print ten magazines and hope to sell three. But, you have to pay a wholesaler, retailer, and a distributor from that money and you wouldn’t see your little bit until 6 months later. That to me was just crazy. You know the idea that subscriptions had to be deeply discounted in order to try to build up a good audience was amazing. You’re paying for paper, and you’re essentially giving it away for free. You have to lose money in order to hope and pray that you’re going to get advertisers to cover that cost. I mean, there was nothing solid about it. When you really stop and look at it, you’re dependent on many factors. You’re really losing money, hoping to make money. When the advertising market became quite fickle to me, the writing was on the wall as an independent publisher.
