Reasons for the closure of women's health journals

There is a long-term misalignment between content supply and the needs of the new generation of audiences, the commercial monetization path continues to narrow due to the impact of short video platforms, and the irreconcilable conflict between the high threshold, high costs and low returns of professional content production.

The last time I had sex with Sister Zhang, the former editor-in-chief of "Women's Health Outlook", she drank half a bottle of cold beer and sighed and said that in the last half year, the editorial board and the operations department were quarreling with each other. The operations department was going to do a special topic on "How to repair damaged pelvic floor muscles in women who sit for a long time in the workplace." The editorial board The old professor at the meeting slammed the table and said, "It's not serious for an unmarried and childless girl to talk about pelvic floor muscles." The final version was still about "pelvic floor muscle care during pregnancy". The printed version was piled in the warehouse and could not be sold. The publisher directly returned half of the goods.

Of course, this kind of "poor concept" is not an isolated case. The editorial board members of many women's health journals that have been published for more than 10 years are mostly older gynecologists and obstetrics experts. They are completely unfamiliar with the current needs of young women such as anti-aging, emotional management, workplace health, reproductive medicine and beauty, and are even biased. The content published is either "you should not touch cold water during menstruation" that has not changed in ten years, or it is preaching that is divorced from reality, and readers naturally do not buy it.

Some people think that this is because the journal cannot let go of its academic pretensions and can survive by compromising with the market. However, this statement is often criticized by people in the industry. When I attended a health science popularization seminar before, the director of the gynecology department of a tertiary hospital said that professional health content and the content that bloggers mainly traffic are not the same. In order to increase their fans, bloggers can just say "drinking a cup of soy milk every day can prevent premature ovarian failure". Do you want journals to dare to publish this? Who is responsible for misleading the audience? Professional content is inherently slow and not that "cool". If you give up rigor for traffic, then the journal might as well just change to a marketing account. There is no need to bear the name of a professional journal.

In fact, content misalignment is not the most fatal thing. The most fatal thing is that advertisers can run faster than readers. In the past two years, I took over as the person in charge of the health line advertising of a foreign pharmaceutical company. They used to invest 1.8 million yuan in advertisements in four women's health journals every year, mainly for calcium supplement and multivitamin products. In 2021, they directly cut off this budget and split it into 120 KOL cooperation orders, which were invested in gynecologists and health bloggers on Xiaohongshu and Douyin. People have made clear calculations: if you invest in a journal, the cost of each user who buys in the store is 217 yuan, but if you invest in a blogger, it is only 32 yuan. Which one would you choose?

The few women's health journals that can still get advertisements are basically supported by old relationships with maternal and infant brands and gynecological pharmaceutical companies. Cooperation fees have also been reduced to less than one-third of the previous ones. Many journals can hardly even pay the basic salary of editors. Some people have proposed monetizing paid content and adopting the route of high-quality professional content, but there is also a lot of opposition: originally, women's health science popularization is to cover low-income groups in the sinking market. Paying is equivalent to blocking out the people who need science popularization most, which violates the original intention of running a magazine.

To be honest, even if you are willing to put down your pretentiousness and look for content and shamelessly look for money, the production costs are enough to crush most publications. To publish a health science article in a regular professional journal, you must first find a corresponding licensed physician to write the article. After writing, you must ask an expert above the associate chief physician to review the article. Contents involving medication, diagnosis and treatment must go through three rounds of review by the editorial board. The review fee alone costs 2,000 to 3,000 yuan per article. There was a journal that did not last until 2023. It once wanted to publish a special issue on HPV science. It cost more than 70,000 to hire six experts to review and proofread the manuscript. It printed 12,000 copies and priced it at 12 yuan a copy. In the end, excluding free copies and wholesale distribution channels, it sold less than 3,000 copies in total. It did not even earn back the printing fee, let alone the manuscript fee and review fee.

I have previously consulted on the new media transformation of a women's health journal that is still running. Their review process is: author writing → first review by editor → second review by experts from the corresponding department → third review by the director of the editorial board → final review by the president. Just like this process, it can take up to 12 days at the fastest. The last time they wanted to pursue the hot topic of "nine-price HPV vaccine for age extension", after the content was reviewed and released, it was already 22 days later. The hot spot was completely cold. The number of views of that public account was only 1,700, which was not as many as the number of likes posted by a small blogger in the circle of friends.

When I was packing up my old books last year, I came across a book called "Women's Health" from 2008. It talked about popular science about breast cancer screening, which was 100 times more reliable than many rumors on the Internet today. However, such good content has no room for survival now. Now the industry is also looking for new ways. There are several companies that have not stopped publishing and are cooperating with local women's federations and public welfare foundations. They rely on project funding to cover costs and publish free of charge to grassroots women. There are also some who are trying to establish paying reader groups and give health lectures to companies. However, they are still trying it out, and no one is sure whether it will succeed.

After all, for ordinary women who really need reliable health science, it is not a good thing to miss a professional journal that is free of advertisements and does not make up nonsense.