I recently got an offer for cheap subscription and a request to do advertising with an iPhone-oriented magazine, so I take a look, I'm willing to spend money to make money…

…but it's only distributed quarterly in print (for a yearly subscription) and on Zinio.

Really? In 2009?

Print is, essentially, dead. Old people still read print newspapers and magazines, but anyone young enough (and some old people who still keep up) uses the Web to read news. A printed magazine is going to be at best weeks, and at worst MONTHS out of date by the time it comes out. Back in the '90s, reading on a flickery CRT was unpleasant, but most of us have nice LCDs, or even e-paper.

If there aren't enough eyeballs, you can't make a profit by advertising, and the kind of people who buy print magazines are the least likely to be my customers.

Zinio is even worse. It's a DRM-locked PDF reader. I used to get a few magazines on it… until it decided my computer was no longer valid, and nothing I could do, no email or phone call to their customer abuse line, could ever re-authorize me. They have a web site with a terrible, slow, unbelievably awful Flash reader. It's like someone set out to make reading online so miserable you'd have no choice but to buy print. Normally I attribute these things to incompetence, not malice, but what Zinio does goes far beyond mere incompetence.

I won't read a Zinio mag, and as a potential advertiser, I wouldn't expect any tech-savvy customers to come from it.

Let's take a look at four other publishers:

iProng

iProng has a really sweet free PDF, unlocked, you can read it with Preview.app, and subscribe in iTunes. It's hyperlinked throughout so it can interact with the Web. It's my second-favorite music magazine (after Metal Hammer).

Clearly they make good money from advertising. The ads are a positive, they're one of the reasons I read it, so I can see the cool products being pushed there.

ATPM: About This Particular Macintosh

ATPM is a semi-pro volunteer "e-zine", distributed as HTML on the site, or PDF for download. It's not glossy and rich, but it's a good informative newsletter, and the content is as good as any product magazine on a newsstand has ever been.

Python Magazine

Python Magazine is a paid (and somewhat expensive) technical journal in PDF or print + PDF; Python developer content only, but it's a lot like the old Dr. Dobb's Journal before DDJ went down the drain. It's well-designed, and well-written. The ads are sadly pretty thin, mostly conferences, which goes along with the price and the small but professional audience.

Macworld

Macworld is an old magazine, and not always in a positive way. They persist in publishing print; it has a long history on the newsstand, is general-interest enough to sell large numbers, and at monthly publication isn't TOO out of date by the time someone sees it, though still weeks old. It also has a digital distribution, but it's through fucking Zinio.

Fortunately, they manage to keep the web site up to date, and that's the only contact I have with their magazine. They have a Browse Macworld view on the site, which provides summaries and icons for each link, far more useful than their default web site.

Macworld is probably unique in the Mac market in being able to still get away with that kind of retro behavior, and even there, even with a growing Mac user base… it can't be easy. The market is just too small for anyone else.

For a new publication to be copying the business model of Macworld, except slower and less relevant and more focused, on a fast-moving platform where news can come and go in a day or a week? That's… unrealistic, to be charitable.

The publisher of the magazine gave me some quarterly distribution numbers… they're less than this infrequently-updated, non-professional, ranty, non-advertised little blog gets per month. I expected low numbers, but to see exactly how low was horrific. I almost want to subscribe out of pity.