THE NOSTALGIA BUSINESS MODEL

“You’re monetizing it [your archives] from the advertising side and the consumer side. You have the long tail of people buying it as a single copy. We also push it out to subscribers. And advertisers love them — they can own it entirely.”

Publishers are sitting on a gold mine. Your archives.

Don’t get too excited: Revenue from selling archived materials is not going to replace lost print advertising income or compete with revenue from events.

But your archives are assets that you have already paid for, so aside from handling, it’s clear profit.

The biggest market is old photos and collections of previously published material in themed print and e-book collections.

In The New York Times’ Innovation report, one of the big missed opportunities called out was the use of its archived content, wrote Lucia Moses of Digiday. “It’s one of the big advantages legacy publishers have over digital upstarts: access to years of high-quality content — content that can be resurfaced or repackaged and sold to both readers and advertisers.

“The New Yorker has long repurposed its archives as print anthologies on topics ranging from cats to food,” wrote Moses. “[It has also taken the] coffee-table book approach digital. Since 2011, it’s published eight singletopic e-anthologies, drawing from already published material. Readers have downloaded them hundreds of thousands of times. Some are single- copy purchases of $2.99 each and up; the rest were downloaded as part of a subscription.”