The publishing business is a very difficult one
to make money in. Although, as the number of
publishers decrease, the price of books seem to be
increasing (we got a Christmas catalog from one of
the major book sellers and they have the
open-faced greed market skills to ask $40
for a paperback edition of a best-selling
biography). But I digress.
As difficult as the book business is, the
magazine end of the spectrum is full of every kind
of reading you could imagine. Add in to that, the
pull of the Internet, and you have a recipe for
declining revenues. As a result, many print
magazines went electronic, or are thinking about
it.
But going electronic didn't save them because,
while the cost of printing went to zero, it was
awfully difficult to sell ads to companies based on
a cyberspace version of a magazine. The Second Wave
response to the problem has been to sell
subscriptions. However, save for a few exceptions
(can you say p0rn?), this business model hasn't
worked any better than the first.
And yet, hope springs eternal when you are
grasping at straws </mixed_metaphor>. Such is
the sad case of the granddaddy of computer
magazines: Byte.
The paper edition went belly up a couple of
years ago but was revived in name as an electronic
edition at www.byte.com.
Sadly, as their announcement notes (see it here),
they will be switching to a subscription service
next week.
I say sadly because this may be their last gasp
before they go down. Why doesn't the subscription
model work? Because of, to use an economic term,
the free rider problem. That is, the Internet is
full of information free for the picking. While it
is true that no one knows you are dog in
cyberspace, quality wise, if someone tries to sell
something that can otherwise be gotten for free,
why pay?
And so Byte is in the unenviable position of
trying to sell information that can be found for
free. </Byte>