On Jul 31, 2006, at 10:16 PM, Tom Johnson wrote:
One of the fundamentals of start-up magazine publishing, at least in the traditional ink-on-paper sense, is that you have to have a very good idea of how large is your pool of potential advertisers, what is their advertising budget and how far out is that money committed? Forget about reader revenue; subscribers are a minor factor when it comes to paying the bills. And even then, I wonder how big the potential readership would be for such a publication in English? 150? 1,500? 5,000? ¿Quien sabe? (Steve Guerin: How big is this listserv?)Yes, this is an excellent point.
Stereophile has natural advertising audiences, I suspect: recording companies and equipment mfgrs.Yes...
So who would buy advertising in such a "publication" about Complexity and related matters? Yes, an occasional book publisher and maybe, in time, some consulting firms selling Complexity as a solution to ??? but then.....Unless it breaks over to Popular venues like Wired, or PopSci or even SciAm... which becomes lots of high-end products.
That said, traditional production costs look very different through the lens of online publishing, eliminating much of the cost of traditional pre-press (though good online publishing is still somewhat labor intensive; good copy editors are a treasure) and all of the costs of ink, paper and distribution.I don't know if paper and ink are dead yet... maybe they are for new titles... I'm an early adopter of online in many ways and it hasn't met my expectations at all... I still read paper and ink. Would I pay a premium subscription for "Hacking Complexity"? I don't know... $100/year... maybe... $29.95/year, surely... and could someone land enough advertisers? Larry could if anyone could. But maybe it is out of reach.
One approach might be to do the quality online publication with something close to but not-rigid regularity, give away the content for the first X days, but after that charge X dollars to download each article in PDF. This strategy, over time, would start to build a library of material that could be used for teaching and by other interested parties. Another strategy could be to give away the first half of an article, but charge for the remaining 50 percent.I think a hot product might make it, but the internet is more of a morass than the magazine shelf at Barnes & Noble... it would be hard to distinguish oneself.
In the distant past, I was the editor for Scientific American readers and off-prints. In the mid-'70s we were grossing about $1mill a year with very little production cost (the content had already been paid for; resetting the pages a minimal expense) and a couple guys in the warehouse doing the picking and shipping. I don't have the data, but I doubt that SA is even doing the off-prints any longer. Might it be that everybody in today's digital universe expects to get what they need/want for free ( e.g. Wikipedia, or the Social Science Research Network -- http://www.ssrn.com/ )?All good points... I just wanted to suggest this opposite the concept of a book (complementary concepts) on complexity/nonlinear/emergence.
-tom johnson
(who still buys books and whose house overflows with magazines, some of which I get around to reading)
I came to LANL with a fresh degree in Physics/Math in 1980 just as all of these concepts were about to grow and blossom in the fertile soil of ubiquitous computing... So I'm fascinated with where it has all gone (and not) in this time.
- Steve
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