If you’re one of the three people reading this then no, you probably haven’t. We haven’t either.

We’re not trying to specifically knock the magazine industry, but rather we only point out that this battle, for the immediate future, has a pretty clear winner:

Perhaps the editors and publishers once figured that they could get their way because Apple chief Steve Jobs needed classy aggregated content for the iPad. If so, the magazine industry had its head in the sand. They need the iPad more than the iPad needs them.

Reuters

So, this seeming marriage made in heaven of new and old media is getting off to an uninspiring start. As The Wall Street Journal noted on Monday, while an increasing number of magazines are edging toward permitting subscriptions on the iPad, “relations between the publishing industry and Apple remain icy.” Read Wall Street Journal’s “More Magazines Try iPad.”

Don’t look for the iPad to offer consumers much of a break. The Economist, for instance, carries a price tag of $110 a year, and the New Yorker costs $4.99 an issue on the iPad. Magazine publishers fret that by playing ball with Apple, they’ll eventually lose control of the customer data that they need for related marketing programs. Bloomberg BusinessWeek this week began offering subscriptions to an iPad variation of its publication for $2.99 a month. Elle and Maxim are among what the Journal called “a small but growing number of magazines willing to sign despite industry-wide concerns about Apple’s reluctance to share customer data.”

The now age-old war between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media will continue until there are a half dozen newspapers and even less magazines on the shelves. In other words, the new media is going to win. The numbers don’t lie.

We point out this battle between the iPad and the magazine publishers still holding out on compromising with Apple as a microcosm of the larger decline of the print industry as a whole. And with that decline, corresponding to millions of fewer eyes viewing print advertising, comes the inevitable rise of new media marketing.

Like most sea changes in marketing and advertising and anything else, the big guys with the cash get into the game first and establish an edge over smaller competitors.

But unlike most other such changes in the past, the internet allows for smaller players to get in and get heard alongside the big guys; the trick is being smart about it.

We can show you how to be smart about it, often with little to no additional investment needed to start your new media marketing campaign.

We are “New Media Marketing for the rest of us“.

Let’s get in the game, together.