There is a buzz around the invigoration of devices such as Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad; that they can breathe new life into the dying print media, making newspapers electronic.

A report published this month by Research2guidance sees mobile apps as the salvation for traditional publishers. The GSMA offices in London are in the heart of what used to be the newspaper industry, yards from Fleet Street. Our local pub is The Cartoonist. Print moved from the area in the acrimony of unions and strikes, but the driving force was costs. Central London was too expensive a place to house the presses and storage for tons of paper. Perhaps with mobile devices being used to deliver content the heyday of journalism can return. With a few square feet of office space you can have a publication without the need for huge print halls.

I was a print editor and publisher. I edited the UK’s biggest computer magazine, Personal Computer World (PCW), then founded and published What Mobile magazine. Today I publish a website on mobile money.

The problem with the model outlined in the aforementioned report is that it assumes the revenue from selling content is important. It isn’t. The main purpose of the cover price is to pay the retailer and distributor. A copy of PCW weighed 1kg. We sold over 200,000 copies a month. We printed and distributed 300,000, because what matters is advertiser response. Shifting that much paper costs a lot of money.

When I owned What Mobile I generally worked on a model of a magazine selling for £4.00. The retailer bought it on sale or return and made £1.20 a copy. The wholesaler made 80p and I printed twice as many copies as we sold because having more copies on the shelf drove up sales – it would be better displayed and you’d never be in a situation where someone who could have bought a copy wasn’t able to. So I saw £2 per sold copy, £1 per printed copy. It mostly paid the print bill on What Mobile, which ran to 100 pages, but fell far short of that on PCW, which was 600 pages. A glossy women’s magazine, printed gravure rather than web offset, probably costs about £20 a copy to print and distribute, yet sells for a fiver. All the other costs – editorial, photography, offices, IT, marketing, salaries etc. – were borne by advertising.

When I was at PCW in the early 1990s the ad revenue was around £0.5 million an issue. Last year the magazine closed. All that revenue had gone to the web.

You can understand why. If I wanted to buy a new drive or card for my PC I’d go to the computer section of cameralabs.com or Toms hardware, read the review and then click on the links to vendors of whatever I’d chosen to buy. Even if I did buy PCW, I’d buy the product over the web. The vast majority of the pages of advertising in the magazine were a catalogue of components. That’s all gone to the web. While Watford Electronics might have booked 20 pages in PCW, in the age of the web they only needed one page to drive traffic to their website. And in the age of the web it is better done as a link, SEO or adword than on paper.

My secret of success in the publishing profession is summed up in four words: “Deliver readers to advertisers.” The web is very good at that: Read. Want. Click. Buy. This is why you should never look at eBay or Amazon after coming back from the pub.

I’d love to think that the future of publishing was Zinio. The old models where journalism and writing were of value could be restored, but, with my business head on, I know that it’s about driving response. Whatever happens with pay walls there isn’t enough money in selling the content to make ends meet. It needs the advertising. This has evolved very well and efficiently on the web. If tablets are going to make money for publishers they need to make money for advertisers. Publishers will need to find something that at least matches, if not tops, ‘Read. Want. Click. Buy.’

Crack that and it’s not just great for publishers but for operators too. Consumers understand a pay-by-the-minute telephony model but they don’t really get pay-by-the-megabyte. Perhaps pay-by-the-magazine is much easier to understand.

And then, perhaps the other people drinking in The Cartoonist might actually be cartoonists and not lawyers.

Simon Rockman is head of the GSMA Mobile Money Exchange, the website for all aspects of mobile money.

The editorial views expressed in this article are solely those of the author(s) and will not necessarily reflect the views of the GSMA, its Members or Associate Members