What happened to the Electronic Magazines?

[jpb]

It is not just electronics magazines that have gone, there used to be several computer magazines which had good technical articles such as Byte, Dr Dobb's Journal and PCW in its early days.

There was another thread discussing this recently - I remember posting a link on it for the issue of Byte which included a version of SPICE for a Commodore 64!

Found it with a bit of searching:


https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/uk-electronics-mag/

   

[james_s]

Computers became boring commodities, which I suppose is the case for some aspects of electronics as well. There are countless websites out there that review the latest computer hardware, I wouldn't subscribe to a magazine for it. I don't think there's nearly as much tinkering going on with PCs anymore, the vast majority of people just buy one and use it until it breaks and then buy a new one. There are really only two mainstream platforms anymore, Windows and Mac.

[jonovid]

Computers became boring commodities, which I suppose is the case for some aspects of electronics as well. There are countless websites out there that review the latest computer hardware, I wouldn't subscribe to a magazine for it. I don't think there's nearly as much tinkering going on with PCs anymore, the vast majority of people just buy one and use it until it breaks and then buy a new one. There are really only two mainstream platforms anymore, Windows and Mac.

some of us still tinker for fun.
Of all the electronic components and devices that I have in my home lab. less the 10% will ever become completed & working projects. the big unknown for my hobby is which electronic components and which devices become completed projects. such is hobby electronics.

[Pitrsek]

For someone into analog stuff Linear Audio might be worth reading
https://linearaudio.net/

[Cerebus]

It's clear from some comments that some people have no idea how print magazines work economically or indeed, what processes are necessary to get a magazine to press, whether 'getting to press' involves a physical printing press or getting to a published PDF file.

For the people who think that a magazine would have a printing operation to sell off if they went on-line only: no. Magazines are pretty much exclusively printed by outside contracted printers. Even the biggest publishers can't afford to keep a print shop that can print 10k, 100k, or 1 million print run magazines and keep it busy all the time. Magazines aren't sent out in dribs and drabs to the shops and subscribers throughout the month, they all turn up on publication day. So, no lucrative print plant to be sold.

Also some people seem to think that the origination costs magically disappear if you go to a PDF only version of a magazine. Again. no. The copy still needs editting, pages still need laying out, illustrations still need originating - in fact all the things that would be done to originate a print edition still need doing.

Elektor helpfully have a media kit, with advertising prices and circulation figures online - so let's use them for a little exercise in running the numbers. They have three other language editions which will require as much effort to put together as the English one, even if they have the same basic content (I know this from real practical experience), so I'm just going to take the English language edition as an example.

The English language printed version of Elektor has a circulation of 15,000 copies. There are 6 issues a year with a cover price of £9.95. That probably translates into a print run of 20,000 copies. The income from distribution will be about 50% of the cover price (the distributor and newsagents need to take their cut).

So that gives us an income from distribution of about £75,000 per issue.

Printing costs on a 100,000 run used to be about 1p a page around 2000 and I have not kept up with rates. Let's assume that standard inflation applies and call it 1.6p a page. Let's be generous and assume that Elektor can get a similar rate for their 20,000 run. The September/October 2017 issue of elektor had 132 pages, so it will have cost at least £42,240 to print.

Ad rates are 3000 euro/full page (1200 1/4 page). In the September/October 2017 issue there were 4 1/4 pages of advertising. That's 13,200 euros from advertising, £11,650.

So our total income, per issue is, £86,650 or £519,900 per year. The net income, from which they have to fund editoral staff, freelance writers, an office to work from, and all the usual overheads is £44,410 an issue or £266,460 per year.

Anybody with some commercial experience will quickly realize that does not translate into plush offices or high salaries for an extensive staff. The editorial team I last worked on generated about the same number of pages per issue as Elektor, but twice as often, and ran to 10 full-time editorial staff (strictly editorial, this was part of a large magazine publishers with ad sales teams, accounts, management, publishers and all the rest of the support functions on top of those 10) plus freelancers as well.

Now, back when I was in the magazine business for a living we used to reckon that the advertising paid for printing and physical distribution costs, and the cover price (after distributors and newsagents cut) paid for editorial and any profit. That is clearly not true nowadays if Elektor can only drum up 4 1/4 pages of advertising in an issue.

[xrunner]

I haven't subscribed to an electronic mag for many years, I think the last one I subscribed to was Byte Magazine.

The other hobby I have is model railroading, which  I'm in the process of building a layout now. I do subscribe to a magazine "Model Railroader" but when the subscription ends I'm not going to renew it. There are very good free online "magazines" and forums and You Tube ... so much is out there on the internets that there is really nothing I can't find anymore. Another hobby magazine dies due to the internets. 

[Gyro]

Oh yes, likewise. That was a good free offer (is there any other kind? ), it gave full access to all of the back issue PDFs too.

It was a one day offer on Boxing Day as I remember, probably worth keeping an eye out this year!

Elektor are offering the same Boxing Day free 3 month trial... If you're quick.  https://www.eevblog.com/forum/buysellwanted/free-3-months-elektor-magazine-trial-membership-expires-dec-26-2017-(000-cet-)/

[floobydust]

Cerebus, what about the revenue from the PCB and kit service, I don't see that in your numbers.

Elektor's markup seems high on PC boards, and then they go out of stock a year later 

Silicon Chip magazine seems to do better with Altronics having PC boards and parts kits, heatsinks all that included which is very nice.

It's really nice to not have to spend a ton of time putting something together, don't we all have dozens of unfinished projects?

[Specmaster]

I can't help it but I still feel that magazines whether on line or in print are very expensive, especially when all things considered with the number of adverts in them accounting for almost 40% of the contents and half the time the remaining part full of things that are not engaging or interesting enough to continue to hang onto their existing subscribers  let alone attract new ones.

In that context they are just as guilty of their own demise as just as many of the large chain stores are and I'm sick of hearing them use the reason for their demise being the internet. Yes the internet happened, but the real culprits for the chain stores is the manufacturers getting greedy and selling to the internet sellers at the same prices as they did to the chain stores. Chain stores had large warehouses and held large stocks, most had their own transport to supply their shops and also do customer deliveries. Internet sellers buy direct from the manufacturers, many hold no stocks and simply place the order direct to the factory and also get the factory to deliver to the end customers, you and I.

The same cannot be said for magazines however, yes the internet does exist and there is a lot of information on it as well, much of it just pure rubbish as almost anybody can put information onto forums such as this one, and we often get things wrong. Search engines search around for keywords users input and they can and do pull information directly out of such forums I know, I have used a search engine and have come across info that I contributed to this forum. Who actually checks that what we say is factually correct, or that the said project schematic or whatever actually works etc? Nobody thats who, our posts are not vetted for accuracy or correctness prior to publishing them on the net. Magazines are supposed to do that by the editing team.

By embracing the internet, switching to online, cheaper subscriptions, which should be possible as there are NO printing, distribution costs and no profit cuts to be taken by wholesalers or newsagents means that straight away that portion of the savings could be passed on to the consumer. That alone might encourage existing subscribers to continue and attract more subscribers. More subscribers, bigger advertisers revenue as a result, better content for the consumer would also encourage more readers to subscribe, bigger circulation would attract more advertisers because they would be reaching more potential buyers. It is a cost induced thing, if it was free and had millions of subscribers worldwide downloading the publications the advertisers would be prepared to pay more because of the exposure that they get to the market. Now I'm not for a single minute suggesting that they should be free now but given time with the right leadership and drive to continue to engage in a meaningful way with subscribers I do believe that at some point in the future they could be and the magazines would have the right staff and offices to continue the process.

Do we pay each time we use a search engines or we use and of the apps that that are available on line from the likes of Google, word processing etc are all free.

Advertisers pay for it all and google as a result gets richer and richer and have very nice plush offices so the model has in theory been proven already.

[Cerebus]

Cerebus, what about the revenue from the PCB and kit service, I don't see that in your numbers.

C'mon, it's clearly a back-of-the-envelope exercise, not a full management accounts report. 

[floobydust]

Cerebus, what about the revenue from the PCB and kit service, I don't see that in your numbers.

C'mon, it's clearly a back-of-the-envelope exercise, not a full management accounts report. 

Your last napkin was quite detailed
I was wondering how much extra revenue might be generated by the kit/pcb service. I couldn't guess how many readers actually buy/build the (service) projects.

Did EPE sack their technical staff and now simply purchases articles from SC magazine?

[Specmaster]

I don't think that anyone took your valid attempt at justification of the cost and demise of the magazines as being a certified set of accounts, I didn't but I did use it as basis for my back of the envelope exercise.

Elektor helpfully have a media kit, with advertising prices and circulation figures online - so let's use them for a little exercise in running the numbers. They have three other language editions which will require as much effort to put together as the English one, even if they have the same basic content (I know this from real practical experience), so I'm just going to take the English language edition as an example.

The English language printed version of Elektor has a circulation of 15,000 copies. There are 6 issues a year with a cover price of £9.95. That probably translates into a print run of 20,000 copies. The income from distribution will be about 50% of the cover price (the distributor and newsagents need to take their cut).

So that gives us an income from distribution of about £75,000 per issue.

Printing costs on a 100,000 run used to be about 1p a page around 2000 and I have not kept up with rates. Let's assume that standard inflation applies and call it 1.6p a page. Let's be generous and assume that Elektor can get a similar rate for their 20,000 run. The September/October 2017 issue of elektor had 132 pages, so it will have cost at least £42,240 to print.

Ad rates are 3000 euro/full page (1200 1/4 page). In the September/October 2017 issue there were 4 1/4 pages of advertising. That's 13,200 euros from advertising, £11,650.

Just using your figures, rough as they may be, they also highlight areas where attempts could have been made to save themselves. Let me make it plain here that I'm not in any way referring to Elektor in this example, just talking about electronic magazines that have ceased and assuming that what holds true for Elecktor also applied to them.

The English language printed version of Elektor has a circulation of 15,000 copies. There are 6 issues a year with a cover price of £9.95. That probably translates into a print run of 20,000 copies. The income from distribution will be about 50% of the cover price (the distributor and newsagents need to take their cut).

So that gives us an income from distribution of about £75,000 per issue.

Just the distribution alone with the wholesalers and newsagents taking their profits out of the cover price equating to something 50%, so removing them from the equation could result in the end price being reduced from £9.95 to something more like £5 a copy and I bet there many subscribers who would have continued to subscribe at that price.

Printing costs on a 100,000 run used to be about 1p a page around 2000 and I have not kept up with rates. Let's assume that standard inflation applies and call it 1.6p a page. Let's be generous and assume that Elektor can get a similar rate for their 20,000 run. The September/October 2017 issue of elektor had 132 pages, so it will have cost at least £42,240 to print.

Now, from the theoretical income of £75,000 there is the cost of printing and on the one given example that was approx. £42,000, thats another cost saved if its a downloaded magazine, thats already taken off a £117,000 per edition and if we were to carry that through to the bottom line that means a magazine subscription cost to the user of £2.70ish per month.

At that kind of cost I suggest that it would attract many many more subscribers and could with the media coverage go global and end up with a total subscriber base of in the order of hundreds of thousands and thats were the payoff would be to pay for the staff and nice plush offices etc, basically the a similar approach to how Tesco's came into being, by piling it high and selling cheaply, sell loads and make a little on each sale and it soon mounts up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesco.

I don't pretend to be an expert by any means but to my mind, keeping it affordable, keeping it relevant, and keeping it interesting to the readers must be the key factors to success, if Tesco can do it then so can others.

[Cerebus]

I can't help it but I still feel that magazines whether on line or in print are very expensive, ...

Nobody thats who, our posts are not vetted for accuracy or correctness prior to publishing them on the net. Magazines are supposed to do that by the editing team.

...

By embracing the internet, switching to online, cheaper subscriptions, which should be possible as there are NO printing, distribution costs and no profit cuts to be taken by wholesalers or newsagents means that straight away that portion of the savings could be passed on to the consumer.

You still seem to miss the point that the origination costs are the same on-line or in print, and that makes up the lion's share of the costs. Running a magazine is like producing a new product every month, that is only on sale for that month, and doing the same thing again next month. The NRE (editorial costs) gets amortized over the product's lifetime, which in this case is one month. If the NRE is big enough the production costs fade toward irrelevance.

I've just done a quick back of the envelope calculation on just the editorial and layout costs (based on the section I used to edit in a real-to-goodness paper magazine) and staffing costs alone come out to around £500 per editorial page. Apply the, fairly standard, rule of thumb that the overheads (office, desk, computer, heating, lighting, etc. etc.) for someone are about the same as their salary, and that comes out at an origination cost of £1000 per page of editorial. Current freelance rates are running at £250-300/1000 words; that's for raw copy that has to be sub-edited, edited, and laid out before it can hit the page/screen.

That's a fixed cost of producing the magazine. All you can do to reduce that cost is to dilute it across as big a base of subscribers as you can. However, the potential number of possible subscribers for Electronics hobbyist magazines is low relative to the number of subscribers for more general interest publications. To give you an idea, in their heyday in the 90's, UK computer magazines (such as PC Magazine, Windows User, PC Pro or PC World) had audited circulations of 50,000 to perhaps 150,000, with 80,000 being a typical figure for the ones that were regarded as doing well. Elektor's current English (not UK, but all English language markets including USA and Canada) circulation is 15,000. You can, of course, pay peanuts and employ monkeys, but then what advantage do you have in quality over self-authored 'stuff' on the Internet.

The last Elektor I got my hands on had 132 pages with just 4 1/4 of those being advertising.

The only reason Elektor exists is that it already existed back in the heyday of print magazines. I suspect that is it slowly dying. With numbers like those, if someone today proposed to me a similar new venture, on-line or in print I wouldn't give it a hope in hell. People have got used to 'free' content and aren't prepared to pay what is required to support high quality content.

Do we pay each time we use a search engines or we use and of the apps that that are available on line from the likes of Google, word processing etc are all free.

Advertisers pay for it all and google as a result gets richer and richer and have very nice plush offices so the model has in theory been proven already.

Check out the rate per 1000 that you can get for on-line adverts and then compare that to the costs of producing content above. Elektor are asking 55 euro/1000 for their priciest spot, I don't know if that is a high rate or not, but I suspect it is. At that rate you'd need over 20,000 page views to cover the editorial costs of that page.

The CPM* average rate in 2015 was around $3 (about £2).

I'm afraid that the truth probably is that it's not a big enough market to support a diverse range of electronics hobbyist magazines either on-line or in print at prices that possible readers are prepared to pay.

You've just posted as I was about to post this. I'll post it anyway and then read what else you've had to say.

*CPM = Cost Per Mille aka cost per thousand

[EEVblog]

Also some people seem to think that the origination costs magically disappear if you go to a PDF only version of a magazine. Again. no. The copy still needs editting, pages still need laying out, illustrations still need originating - in fact all the things that would be done to originate a print edition still need doing.

It's like comparing a Youtube channel that does one highly edited and polished video a week/month, and one that just uploads a live stream without editing, they are chalk and cheese.
Planning and editing, and all the mechanics that goes into producing polished content is what takes the most time and effort.
In this case a magazine, be it print or PDF, or a big polished formatted wordpress article take about the same amount of time.

[Cerebus]

Now, from the theoretical income of £75,000 there is the cost of printing and on the one given example that was approx. £42,000, thats another cost saved if its a downloaded magazine, thats already taken off a £117,000 per edition and if we were to carry that through to the bottom line that means a magazine subscription cost to the user of £2.70ish per month.

BTW, the 15,000 circulation figure for Elektor in English I suspect includes PDF only subscriptions. They don't say, but knowing publishers they would never do anything to make their figures look smaller by, say, only counting paper circulation and not at least separately tabulating PDF circulation - so I conclude they are included in the headline (and only) circulation figure they give.

If you don't have a printed version then you don't have the print advertising revenue. Nobody is going to pay the £9.95 cover price for an online version, which seems to be an unstated assumption in your £117,000, they might pay the £5 you'd have got from distribution, but you've lost your print ad revenue along with your physical print costs.

If, big if, you can convert all your paper sales to online ones that's an income of just £40,500 per issue (at your £2.70 price) that's £243,000 per annum to produce 766 1/2 pages of editorial. At an origination cost of around £1000 per page, that's an annual net loss of £523,500.

If you did that with a £5 'cover price', and didn't lose any subscribers, that'd be a loss of £316,500 per annum.

Calculating the break even point is left to students of linear algebra. 

I doubt there is enough price elasticity of demand to push the subscribers up very much while lowering the price. To even get to 'back of fag packet' calculations on that we'd need a proper economist with some figures for similar markets to use as a benchmark.

It's not looking good...

Like I said, I suspect that this is a dying sub-sector of the publishing business. I have a friend who's a fiction author; that too is a sector that is dying on its feet even with 99p ebook versions of many titles available.

[EEVblog]

Check out the rate per 1000 that you can get for on-line adverts and then compare that to the costs of producing content above. Elektor are asking 55 euro/1000 for their priciest spot, I don't know if that is a high rate or not, but I suspect it is. At that rate you'd need over 20,000 page views to cover the editorial costs of that page.

That is actually a low rate compared to traditional magazine rate of days past. They have had to lower them to compete with online blogs and youtube channels etc, but even at 55EU CPM that's way above what I'm charging for example.

[EEVblog]

Now, from the theoretical income of £75,000 there is the cost of printing and on the one given example that was approx. £42,000, thats another cost saved if its a downloaded magazine, thats already taken off a £117,000 per edition and if we were to carry that through to the bottom line that means a magazine subscription cost to the user of £2.70ish per month.

BTW, the 15,000 circulation figure for Elektor in English I suspect includes PDF only subscriptions. They don't say, but knowing publishers they would never do anything to make their figures look smaller by, say, only counting paper circulation and not at least separately tabulating PDF circulation - so I conclude they are included in the headline (and only) circulation figure they give.

Magazine circulation rate are always inflated, an industry standard multiplication figure is around x1.4

https://www.eevblog.com/2013/03/07/bloggers-dont-sell-out-cheap/

[Specmaster]

You still seem to miss the point that the origination costs are the same on-line or in print, and that makes up the lion's share of the costs. Running a magazine is like producing a new product every month, that is only on sale for that month, and doing the same thing again next month. The NRE (editorial costs) gets amortized over the product's lifetime, which in this case is one month. If the NRE is big enough the production costs fade toward irrelevance.

No, I haven't missed the point at all, it stands to reason that the same costs of preparing the magazine are there what is not there is what you reckoned was the wholesaler/newsagent cut i.e the distribution costs, which you thought was about 50% of the cover price, none of which are required for online magazines and also I used the cost that you estimated it cost for "September/October 2017 issue of elektor had 132 pages, so it will have cost at least £42,240 to print"

I'm not looking for an argument or bad feeling, just merely using your figures that you quoted and taking a layman's view that if the wasted by products could be eliminated the price could be reduced and circulation might and I would certain expect it be to the case, should actually increase and that online magazines could possibly become viable and would be greener in the process.

[Cerebus]

You still seem to miss the point that the origination costs are the same on-line or in print, and that makes up the lion's share of the costs. Running a magazine is like producing a new product every month, that is only on sale for that month, and doing the same thing again next month. The NRE (editorial costs) gets amortized over the product's lifetime, which in this case is one month. If the NRE is big enough the production costs fade toward irrelevance.

No, I haven't missed the point at all, it stands to reason that the same costs of preparing the magazine are there what is not there is what you reckoned was the wholesaler/newsagent cut i.e the distribution costs, which you thought was about 50% of the cover price, none of which are required for online magazines and also I used the cost that you estimated it cost for "September/October 2017 issue of elektor had 132 pages, so it will have cost at least £42,240 to print"

I'm not looking for an argument or bad feeling, just merely using your figures that you quoted and taking a layman's view that if the wasted by products could be eliminated the price could be reduced and circulation might and I would certain expect it be to the case, should actually increase and that online magazines could possibly become viable and would be greener in the process.

No, it's OK, I don't think you're spoiling for a fight.

I just don't think that you can expect people to still pay the printed cover price for an on-line only/PDF-only version. That's where I think your numbers fall apart. Once we get beyond that to debating what effect price will have on readership then I think we're just both trying to grope our way towards figuring out what would work in practice.

The cover price for individual copies of Elektor is £9.95, the price for PDF only individual copies is £6.95. The price for a six issue annual subscription (print + PDF + website member access) is £65.95, and a six issue subscription (PDF + website member access) is £48.95.

If that represents a true assessment of the discount the market expects for PDF only versus print, then the PDF 'cover' price can't be higher than 74% of the print cover price. As that is very close to 75% and they probably did their original calculation in euros, then adjusted prices to the magic X.95 format, I suspect it's an arbitrary figure, not a scientifically derived one. Anyway, nevertheless, I think it supports my argument that there is an expectation of a discount for PDF only access - in this case 74% of the cover price for the subscription with 'member benefits', 70% for individual copies.

Further, as I've already said, I'm far from convinced that a lower price translates into significantly higher sales. It might buy you a few, but I don't think it's enough to produce significantly higher net income overall. My suspicion is that the market is close to saturation, and that it's not a very price sensitive market. People who've £100s to spend on test gear, components and cases aren't going to be particularly sensitive to a few quid one way or another on related magazine prices. Again, that's one for someone with some real economics chops and data to figure out; the best we can come up with is gut feeling on that particular point. The closest we could come to empirical data on that point would be to run a poll on here - at least we have the target audience at our fingertips.

For what it's worth I tend to agree with your perception that current prices feel too high. That is not, however, the same as saying that they are objectively too high for the costs involved. Again, from experience, I know that publishers hate putting up cover prices almost as much as readers hate them going up and aren't want to raise prices unless circumstances force their hands.

Content is another matter, and I, like you, find recent content in electronics mags much less compelling than older content. If there's a leap in improvement to be made, it's probably here. If content is compelling, then reading the start of an article on the news-stand can make you say "Stuff, the price, I must read this article". This could, of course, lead us into a circular argument about the nature of a printed news-stand magazine that can be easily previewed versus a PDF that can't

Also, there is a risk of losing news-stand readership by converting to PDF only. I can't quantify that, but I'm certain that some readers would fall by the wayside that way. There will also be some holdouts that just won't covert from paper to PDF, whether that's a significant number is debatable, but there will be some. Those together would have to be more than offset by any gains in readership from a reduced PDF only price.

I do know that if I was having this debate in an editorial meeting that the debate would be at least as confused as here, and at least 20 degrees hotter. Second guessing your readership is one of the hardest things to do in publishing, and is definitely more of an art than a science.

I'm getting cross-eyed here, time for bed...

[Cerebus]

Now, from the theoretical income of £75,000 there is the cost of printing and on the one given example that was approx. £42,000, thats another cost saved if its a downloaded magazine, thats already taken off a £117,000 per edition and if we were to carry that through to the bottom line that means a magazine subscription cost to the user of £2.70ish per month.

BTW, the 15,000 circulation figure for Elektor in English I suspect includes PDF only subscriptions. They don't say, but knowing publishers they would never do anything to make their figures look smaller by, say, only counting paper circulation and not at least separately tabulating PDF circulation - so I conclude they are included in the headline (and only) circulation figure they give.

Magazine circulation rate are always inflated, an industry standard multiplication figure is around x1.4

https://www.eevblog.com/2013/03/07/bloggers-dont-sell-out-cheap/

If you want to upset an ad space sales-droid or publisher ask them for audited paid sales figures.

[iampoor]

By embracing the internet, switching to online, cheaper subscriptions, which should be possible as there are NO printing, distribution costs and no profit cuts to be taken by wholesalers or newsagents means that straight away that portion of the savings could be passed on to the consumer. That alone might encourage existing subscribers to continue and attract more subscribers. More subscribers, bigger advertisers revenue as a result, better content for the consumer would also encourage more readers to subscribe, bigger circulation would attract more advertisers because they would be reaching more potential buyers. It is a cost induced thing, if it was free and had millions of subscribers worldwide downloading the publications the advertisers would be prepared to pay more because of the exposure that they get to the market. Now I'm not for a single minute suggesting that they should be free now but given time with the right leadership and drive to continue to engage in a meaningful way with subscribers I do believe that at some point in the future they could be and the magazines would have the right staff and offices to continue the process.

Please name an electronics magazine or two that has switched to a PDF only verion that is still successful...

I think you are oversimplifying the problem FAR too much.

[james_s]

I tried subscribing to a pdf only magazine for a while, it was ok but I found I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as flipping through a real magazine. I was hoping someone would make a magazine-sized color e-ink reader but that doesn't seem to be happening.

[floobydust]

I can't help but feel robbed looking at the cover of my EPE. Distribution is 150% markup to Canada  Elektor too.
Price alone will guarantee the mags sit on the shelf. When they don't sell, they eventually get dropped from the lineup in the store. This is part 1 of the decline of electronics magazines.
Forget about content or quality. The fat cats in distribution are a part of it.

[TMM]

There are really only two mainstream platforms anymore, Windows and Mac.

You mean Android and Windows, right?

https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/03/statcounter-android-windows/

[Specmaster]

First, let me clarify my position here as I feel that my point is misconstrued.

I wanted to start taking an electronics magazine but could find any on the shelves in my home City, I scoured the Internet and again drew a blank, this got me thinking and hence the original post.

I'm not an expert on this topic by any means but looking at it in a simplistic format then this is how it strikes me.

A) Circulation of printed magazines is on the decline - Fact.
B) Internet happened - Fact
C) Printing costs money and uses up natural resources, paper, ink etc - Fact
D) Distribution, includes transporting, wholesalers and retailers - Fact
E) Loads of magazines have ceased all together - Fact
F) It costs the same amount of money to produce a magazine up to the point where it is ready to go of to the printers - Fact
G) The combined value of C & D is well over 50% of the printed magazine cover price at the retailers - Fact?
H) If the savings created by dropping C & D are passed onto the customer, with good content, there is a real possibility of readership increasing?
I) Most readers of magazines ceased reading them as the cost escalated, they have other more pressing demands for their money like day to day living in a world were wages have not kept pace with inflation and the recession.
J) Yes there will be some readers who will not switch over to PDF and so will be lost if the magazines go down that route - Fact.
K) The alternative is , if the magazines does not somehow turn things around, they will cease trading and everyone is then a loser - Fact
L) Take around the High Streets, whats the growth in there, it's the rise in the number of shops like Poundland and their rivals - Fact
M) You cannot rely on the "free" information on the internet to be correct as I have already pointed out, there is a load of dross out there - Fact

So what is the answer, short of everyone being paid a load more poney so that they feel wealthy enough to be meet all of the commitments and have some money left over in their pockets for what they see as luxuries and magazines are one of them. Or finding a way to provide a quality service at considerable less cost to the consumer to compete with other "luxuries".

If magazines are to survive long term, then they must evolve and become a thing of desire once again like they used to be, its perfectly clear that the current system is failing.

This topic was raised in the beginning because I was looking for a good magazine that perhaps I could buy, but I failed miserably in all the retailers who supplied magazines and newspapers to find a single one that was electronics based, forget your Arduino magazines, I'm talking of your hard core magazine here. There still seems to be some for model railways, boating, horses and model engineers which maybe are aimed at the better off customers.

Don't believe, put it to the test in your city then and see what you can find?

If anyone is confused about this thread, go back and read my opening post on the subject.