On Mon, 2011-08-08 at 07:26 -0400, Cranky Frankie wrote: > Could it be, with programming the way it is now, > there's no room for something like Dr. Dobb's anymore?
That was a fun gig while it lasted... [grin] The trouble was (IMHO, with no inside information) that advertising drives magazine publishing really, really hard: if your audience isn't what the advertisers want, you don't get any revenue. But if you have articles aligned with your advertising (to attract that specific audience), all *other* readers tend to drop their subscriptions because they're not interested. So DDJ lost all the generalist readers who weren't interested in the gory details of, say, getting Samba to play in a corporate environment. Then they lost all the corporate readers who didn't have any interest in Samba whatsoever. FWIW, your subscription dollars barely pay for printing & distributing the magazine. Advertising pays for *everything* else. > I hope it or something like it comes back someday. MAKE magazine may have hit the current sweet spot for a DIY magazine, although it tends to be a bit simplistic and the articles all have a weird "Let's make a go-cart from scrap lumber, junk bike parts, and $400 worth of new high-end cordless drills!" enthusiasm. Not much in the way of programming, although Arduino love is in full effect. Their cover / subscription price is staggeringly high, which means you're paying for operating expenses that advertising normally covers, and they have a remarkable number of house ads along with a distinct paucity of full-page advertisers. IMHO, that says nobody's figured out how to make enough money from that market to pay for big ads (and a big magazine); there may be several million-dollar open-source hardware companies out there, but they haven't cleared the gantry yet. It was a distinct surprise when I walked by a DDJ poster at Embedded Systems one year and spotted my name on the wall... -- Ed http://softsolder.com _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Sep 7 - DIY 3D Printing and the Makerbot Thing-o-Matic Oct 5 - Distributed Authentication Systems Nov 2 - Nov 2011
