Is it just me, or is it cheap in here?…The New York Times reported recently that Halsey Minor (founder of the tech news site Cnet.com) is also a fan of magazines. The article says, “Amid the YouTube-fueled craze for user-generated content, he wondered why readers, instead of writers and editors whom he would have to pay, could not do most of the heavy lifting. He also pondered how he might get rid of, or at least reduce, the large ad sales staff.”
Do people wonder this only about writers, or somewhere is somebody wondering, “Hmm, I wonder how I might get my spleen removed without having to pay any doctors?”
Anyway, back to the story: he and some partners founded 8020 Publishing. The Times says “Mr Minor wants to build the company into an empire of Web-generated print magazines.” People submit their photos to JPGmag.com and online readers vote on their favorites. Then a staff of ten designs the layout and six times a year an edition of about 50,000 slick magazines are printed. The annual subscription is $25, individual copies are $6 via newsstands. The online version is free, as is a PDF file that can be printed. These freebies don’t seem to dent the newsstand sales (they have only a 30% return rate). Both the online and print versions also carry ads. Minor told the Times they can afford to limit advertising because they do “not need it to make a profit from them" since they make money on each subscription and newsstand sale.
The experiment has been successful enough that they have now launched a travel magazine, Everywhere, based on a similar model.
Hmm, there are profits based on the appeal of the content…for which nobody gets paid. Obviously you can’t stop people from giving their content away and letting others make all the profit from it—but I don’t advise it.
