Ian Collinson, managing director, Parker and Collinson
Short-run personalised magazines may be useful for high-end sales literature or user-specific content, but in terms of genuine news media, they will be too expensive to distribute, even if they are relatively cheap to produce. The logical outcome for this type of product for media is a digital ‘flikki’-type product, but this is the other extreme where it can be produced so cheaply it is more mass-market and can be made free with a reasonable amount of advertising content. Rising distribution costs will eventually drive most of these products online.

Andy Fox, managing director, The Finishing Company
I can’t really comprehend how you would personalise an entire run. We bought a Nexpress a few years ago and for about 10 of my customers we print personalised front covers for repeat subscriptions. When it gets to a few issues before the end of their current run, the front cover is personalised encouraging them to visit the website and sign up for another year. If you have the data, there is no reason why the cover and perhaps a few pages inside the magazine could not be personalised – perhaps to attract them to other publications. But I don’t think you are going to get runs of 10,000 all personalised.

Paul Warren, managing director, Digital Studio
Anything personalised tends to keep people’s attention for longer and you are less likely to throw it away as quickly. If it’s got your name on it, or has been tailored to your interests, it’s far more engaging. If done well and the industry leans that way, then I think short-run personalised magazines are the way to go. An increasing number of newspaper readers are going online to read the content they want and publishers are updating their websites more frequently to cater for their readers. The future of personalised digitally-printer magazines really depends though on the technology and the costs of production coming down.

Dominic Duffy, managing director, Ceros
Empowering the general populace to become magazine publishers is certainly interesting as it represents possibly the first large-scale incarnation of social media in print. However, as with the more established forms of social media, empowerment is no filter for quality. The struggle to monetise social media is due in no small part to the reluctance of advertisers to be associated with the dubious quality of the massive volumes of user-generated content. While quality will take a little time, it will be less than anyone expects. Remember the ‘million monkeys in a room’ adage?