It seems the tide is beginning to turn in the Publishing industry – prominent US publisher, Atlantic Media, is reporting that its digital advertising revenue is now beating print advertising revenue.

Though by a relatively small margin (the revenue split is 51% digital, 49% print), industry specialists believe that this is a first for any publisher as large or well-known as Atlantic (founded 1857).

Growth over the last few years in digital has been huge and undeniable. Though a 51% to 49% split may look fairly close at first glance, it’s when you take the speed of change into account that the figures look truly impressive: as recently as 2008, online advertising accounted for only 9% of total ad revenue. Importantly, the growth in online has not been at the cost of print revenue, which, far from declining, is the healthiest at Atlantic as it has been since 1999.

So what does this tell us about the future of publishing? Though few others are near the degree of success achieved by Atlantic Media, many publishers are seeing their advertising revenue depending more and more upon digital avenues. The key to Atlantic’s success surely lies in part in its low advertising costs, but also – most importantly - in its willingness to evolve and transform to fit the changing landscape. Nowadays, they’re less a magazine publisher and more of a multimedia organisation spanning across a collection of websites, who also happen to occasionally release a magazine. This approach – one also favoured notably by The Guardian Media Group PLC in the UK, along with a growing number of other organisations globally – has allowed them to maintain their print audience, whilst growing and broadening their audience in the digital realm.

Publishing companies such as Atlantic understand that it is content, far more than context, which is key; whether content appears in traditional formats such as a book, newspaper, magazine, or whether it appears on new digital and mobile platforms, the value lies in the content itself. To maximise this value and thrive as a business, companies are recognising that they need to explore new technologies and processes to take advantage of this new multimedia, multi-platform environment. This ability to be flexible and extendible can give enterprises the ability to stay on top in a constantly shifting landscape, in which every year brings new varieties of platform (desktops, laptops, netbooks, tablets, e-readers, smartphones etc); not to mention myriad operating systems.

Desire to expand into and explore new technologies and platforms, coupled with the need in the current climate to keep processes as cost-effective as possible, is also leading a number of companies to choose to embrace enterprise-grade, open-source solutions rather than locking themselves into large license fees with proprietary software products and fixed roadmaps. The large potential for community-based support built into many open-source solutions can lend them considerable advantage in a fast-changing landscape such as publishing.