The most popular Black men’s magazines have been having a comparatively hard time adjusting online.  King-mag.com and smoothmag.com have both seen their total traffic in terms of unique visitors per month drop to about half of what it was a year ago.   Much like in the print world, that has left Smooth as an also-ran behind the more popular King Magazine, whose web traffic is still four times that of smoothmag.com.  To make matters worse, dimewars.com has eclipsed smoothmag.com in traffic since last summer, essentially making smoothmag.com the third most popular online magazine targeting black men.

Smooth owes at least some of its digital woes to an identity complex that has faced a number of men’s print magazines forced to move online to stay competitive.  Audience who paid for access to the print magazine have been accustomed to getting what they want for free online.   Advertisers who paid big bucks to showcase their products in magazines are more hesitant to spend the same amount of money marketing online because they have so many more options to choose from and can negotiate to pay far less than they do in print magazines.  To appease the online audience, publishers would either have to give some of their printed content away for free or add original content to its website.  Either way, it costs the magazines more for less return.

Smooth originally put teasers, partial versions of printed articles, on its website to entice readers to buy the printed version.  In a perfect world, the rest of Smooth’s more formidable competition would do something similar, forcing the audience to pay for the content and keep the magazine running profitably with no more than a slight deviation from the original business model.  Black Men Magazine, for instance, chose to put none of its original editorial content online.  King, the leading black men’s magazine in print and online, chose another route that has or will force its competition to follow them on the web.  King published its printed content online as well as added the occasional online-only piece.  In order to to stay competitive on the web, Smooth had to bring something to the table as well.

Instead of giving away content it paid for, Smooth introduced smoothblogger.com sometime between September and October of last year.  Although it seems like little more than a blog with a social networking component, the platform is a unique amongst minority and general interest men’s online magazines.  No noteworthy online men’s magazine has a true social networking component, instead opting to build community through comments and messaging boards, a tactic that has worked well for king-mag.com and askmen.com in particular.  If smoothblogger.com were to ever catch on among its niche and fringe audiences, it could very well decrease the distance between Smooth and its online competitors.

Still, it’s been at least five months since smoothblogger.com launched, and the results are less than impressive.  As of this posting, the site has fewer than 800 members and hardly more than a handful of visitors signed in at any given time.  Part of the reason may be that a men’s lifestyle magazine social network doesn’t give much reason for its audience to talk to one another.  Most social networks thrive off of mutual interest among members that include business, careers, sex, or specific community-based interests such as art, politics, music, under-the-table activities, poetry, etc.  They are probably the only reasons people see a benefit in promoting  a friends list or sending notes to directly to individuals rather than just joining in on publicly displayed forums and comment boards.  Myspace thrives in part because many of its members use the site to openly promote their interests in music and entertainment or to date other members.  Until recently, BlackPlanet was a social network with a reputation for being little more than a dating service.

Many of the women who join smoothblogger.com are current and aspiring models who are there to promote their careers more than interact with the rest of smoothblogger.com community.   Men on smoothblogger.com probably have little to no motivation to talk directly to or make friends with one another.  It’s not like they are using the site to cut deals behind the scene.

Smooth still should move forward with the site, as its the one place its competitors are not a step ahead of them.  But smoothblogger.com needs to find its purpose and its focus fast, a particular set of reasons for why readers of the magazine would sign up to be members of its social network.  It can start by dedicating a handful of bloggers to specific subjects in order to give the site some editorial authority and a reason for readers to go there first.   Smooth would also likley benefit from better cross-promotional marketing and integration that more closely associates smoothblogger.com, smoothmag.com, and Smooth Magazine with one another.