honesly Maclife could use

Submitted by nekollx on Wed, 01/07/2009 - 9:41am

honesly Maclife could use the Sure Awesome backwash of MaxPC. God everytime i go there for someuseful info for my mac i FEEL brain celsl dieing.

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I posted this in a thread on

Submitted by willsmith on Wed, 01/07/2009 - 8:48am

I posted this in a thread on the forums a week or two ago regarding the problems Ziff is having.

EGM, Games for Windows (CGW), and PC Magazine shut down because Ziff Davis's business model collapsed, not because of any inherent flaw in magazines, the editorial staffs, or print in general.

There are three basic ways magazines make money: 1. on advertising sales 2. on newsstand sales 3. on subscribers. Depending on the type of magazine (enthusiast book, trade pub, etc) and the publisher, the ratio of money made from the different areas can change.

Ziff always focused heavily on ad revenue, at the expense of the other two areas. One of the main ways to maximize ad revenue is to pump up your circulation (the number of copies you distribute to people) artificially so you can charge advertisers more for ads (more people = more money). Unfortunately for them, this is insanely expensive, and means that instead of making money on your subscribers, you lose money on them. So, as the ad dollars went from awesome to merely good in the areas that these books covered, they started having trouble. In order to keep those advertisers they did have happy, they couldn't let those magazine's circ drop back down to natural levels. They were trapped with an incredibly expensive circ base to maintain. Because they'd set the expectation over the years that their mags weren't worth much (on newsstand or in sub form) and they promised their advertisers that X number of people would see the ads, they were totally fucked.

My company (and other successful niche publishers) rely on all three pillars for revenue. We have a much lower circulation (250k for Maximum PC vs. around 1M for PC Mag), but we're not giving away copies for free, like PC Mag did. We make money on subscriptions as well... It's not a ton, but it doesn't cost us money every month to send our mags out the door. So, when advertising gets a little tight, as it tends to do any time the economy goes bad, we still have two good revenue streams which keep our publications afloat until times are better again.

There are going to be high-profile magazine closures in the future. The mass market titles, like Time, Newsweek, TV Guide, and other similar titles are having a very hard time, because they never offered anything unique that's not readily available on the web. However, until there's a color Kindle-type device that you can buy for less than $100, print isn't dead.

TLDR: PC Magazine, EGM, and GfW didn't close because "print is dead", but because Ziff couldn't or wouldn't shift its business model to work with changing times. Saying "print is dead" because one magazine publisher is imploding is ludicrous. You wouldn't say "Cars are dead" just because GM is failing, would you?

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because they killed 1up

Submitted by Captain on Wed, 01/07/2009 - 3:27pm

its ziff davis and UGO's fault for selling out on readers and their own employees. they made stupid economical mistakes and decided to kill off some of the most important things 1up had to solve the mistakes, and it still didnt work well. in the end they layed many great people off the job for more money, mainly ziff for jumping ship like they did. i know this is what businesses do in the real world, but not giving a shit about your fanbase and employees that have been around for so long, is not right. i still give the best of wishes for those layed off, and that they will find as great of a job as tey had before.

 here is an exerpt from Jeff Green's blog, go read it if you havent, plus sam Kennedy's post about 1up was trash, he just tried to make a good deal of it, and failed, though I understand what he's going through, and its not his fault. its been removed from the site as of now, but read Jeff's it does justice to 1up.

 

"...I'll just say what would have been nice to read, instead: "Our website
is decimated. Our new owners failed to recognize the talent we had,
which comes as no surprise since their own website values
lowest-common-denominator pandering over quality content. We will do
our best to do what we can, despite the fact that they gutted us. This
fucking sucks."

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I think Future US is in a

Submitted by eday_2010 on Wed, 01/07/2009 - 12:17pm

I think Future US is in a lot better shape than Ziff-Davis was. All their magazines seem to be doing quite well. SAme with IDG (GamePro, PC World)

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