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This may be the most Hacker News comment I've ever seen.

There are some sectors of the magazine industry, maybe science isn't one of them, that are actually doing really well. I've been on three different junkets with outdoors magazine editors in the past 6 months, and many large brands that advertise to the Duck Dynasty crowd are abandoning digital and going back to print.

Digital, it turns out, is mostly a scam. I've written in other places about why this is, but the nutshell version is bad ROI metrics and, even worse, the incentives on all sides are so perverted that the bad metrics and rampant fraud are a fundamental structural/business problem that no amount of tech can solve.

At any rate, the jig is, increasingly, up on digital (FB and Google excepted, because they run genuine performance advertising platforms at a scale that nobody else can match), and advertisers are actually going back to print, TV, radio -- venues where the ROI metrics are old, established, widely agreed upon, and fairly reliable.

Anyway, this situation is very complex and very very very different from what the typical HN "dead tree is expensive and for losers, the future is digital!" commenter thinks. If anything is in real trouble right now for deep structural reasons, it's digital, not print.

You probably find all this hard to believe -- I did at first until I heard it confirmed by the sixth or seventh person. I know that what I just said sounds like "up is down, and black is white", but this is how it is in 2017.

I really like print magazines...I have a print subscription to the New Yorker, New York Magazine and the Sunday NYTimes. The serendipitous discovery of interesting content, the ability to just grab it on the way out the door and the paper format make for a great experience.

I think print based reading material will have a place for longer than most people would have predicted a few years ago.

For corroboration, check the begging notes at the bottom of Guardian articles and the recent enhancements of the NYT paywall.

The begging is just so they can get free money. They know their audience are a bunch of saps. It is greed more than desperation.

Great point. I've always been puzzled about how advertisers get any ROI online. I'm a very heavy internet user on a variety of topical areas, and my lifetime value for a content site is zero. Exceptions are NY Times, my local paper and Gartner, where either my employer or I pay for the content.

I rarely click on ads. I've probably been a successful ad conversion less than a dozen times since 1996.

Print is different. Getting ads is a significant reason for having a newspaper subscription. Many magazine ads are both more useful and more effective than the ad units that you se online. I probably made a Nikon/Canon decision based on a combination of print ads.

Also, some of the print ads in nautilus aren't that bad. I've actually stopped and taken some extra time to think about a few. Less about what the ads trying to sell me, but the ad itself raises an interesting question.

Doesn't this whole counter-comment assume that advertising is the only reasonable source of revenue? The HN crowd (projecting from myself) has already given up on digital advertising and knows that even the best players are having a hard time making money with it. That doesn't make print any more reliable. For a magazine like nautilus, it's probably best to become successful as a subscription-based digital magazine, guarantee high-quality content, establish rapport with their customers, and then move to print if they want to rake in that extra advertisement dollars. That was the point of the parent comment, not "print sucks/digital rules!", but "digital is the right way to start a new magazine".

Digital is definitely going through a much needed adjustment, but old media is not coming back. It is stabilizing after suffering a huge blow but wont grow back. Too much new media entertainment is coming out to have old media compete.

> Anyway, this situation is very complex and very very very different from what the typical HN "dead tree is expensive and for losers, the future is digital!" commenter thinks. If anything is in real trouble right now for deep structural reasons, it's digital, not print.

Somehow TapeOp magazine manages to deliver ~41.5K free print subscriptions every other month, at least in the US (digital subscription is included).

TapeOp has advertising, not sure if editor/publisher draw a salary, and I'm guessing that freelance interviewers/product reviewers get paid little if anything. Nonetheless, they've been the most kickass music production/recording magazine for more than 20 years.

Some info on how they do it: http://tapeop.com/mediakit/print/

After seeing this, I was reminded I forgot and let my sub lapse.

I go to their site to subscribe, and they are selling a year of the print & digital for $29. That's insane -- they don't even add on postage fees anywhere in the checkout process. It's literally $29, out the door.

I signed up for 2 years and just hope they are around for that time. I can't believe the direct costs of printing and shipping such a beautiful magazine don't exceed $5 per issue (12 issues over 2 years for $60).

Maybe they have found how price sensitive consumers are for their content, or maybe they know they can get higher ad rates with more print, but I don't see how they're even covering their costs for printing and shipping this to me, much less content or editorial staff, etc.

>It's literally $29, out the door.

Yeah I didn't really get that. I kept looking for a * somewhere to indicate that it's $29 monthly. I'd have no problem doing monthly. $29 out the door is absolutely insane.

Note that the price is a special limited offer sale. It's normally $59/year. And it's only 6 issues per year.

> I can't believe the direct costs of printing and shipping such a beautiful magazine don't exceed $5 per issue

A few Quora answers put the cost of printing a typical magazine at less than $1 per copy. Magazines have a special postage rate that's cheaper than a single first class stamp. That means printing and sending the print magazine could cost just about half of what you're paying for the subscription, leaving the other half to pay for the content and overhead.

Nautilus' print edition is a beautiful magazine, definitely can't be compared to a typical print mag. It's the quality of a National Geo mag, I think.

But look, there's a bigger problem here. Maybe they can't get 34k subscribers because it's hard to get people to cough up $60 a year, have all their subscription data resold yadda yadda.

You say the problem is dead-tree publishing but I don't think the additional layout and printing costs are so much bigger than what you've outlined above. They're trying to cut costs by not paying the people who actually produce the content (as opposed to those who package it through the editorial function); their other alternative is to produce more popular content that would attract more ad revenue, but that would mean a loss of quality because markets don't always reward quality.

This is, literally, why we can't have nice things.

Capitalism is why we can't have nice things in the first place. Capitalism precludes news media from reporting fairly and accurately rather than pander to their advertisers. Another example: want cheap fast internet? Too expensive to run fibre even though these corporations are making profits that run into billions and none of the US giants will have this so-called "common carrier" policy.

It's not "capitalism", it's human nature. We like cheap stuff. And the bystander effect. It's free online, so someone else will surely solve it, pay for it, fund it, support it, etc.

Yes, it is to do with "capitalism" and the product of a society geared towards making money instead of making cool stuff. It isn't immutable, there are better ways of doing things, but then again that's beyond the scope of the argument. :^)

No, it's not. Capitalism is private ownership of capital, which means there's a whole lot of economic activity generated by thinking about what to invest in, which is just a blind optimization process.

Society could harness it for good or bad. We have cheap applied science things (microprocessors with radios and amazing magically touch sensitive displays without ugly cords with endless content and ability to just call each other anywhere* on the planet), and we have of course things like the great firewall of china (and turkey and so on) which do deep packet inspection, enabled by very similar technology companies.

But it's immutable. You can't choose the second best thing. Because that just means your preferences and thus your utility function values underdogs above topdogs, hence you'll see those as the best. It's just tautological. And sure, we'll probably climb out of this hole eventually, but maybe with things like patreon and co: http://alternativeto.net/software/patreon/ (for example AdBlock + Flattr seems like a good solution to the advertising hell)

Furthermore, just to talk about the original point of "capitalism is killing quality news" ... are you sure? I mean there are still quality news outlets, and there will be, but the problem is that people don't read them. And bias. Even if you could sign up to be a journalist and magically get a fixed income if at least 10 000 people are reading your stuff, there would be a lot more crazy/spam out there. _Because_ people are people, they cheat, they like easy solutions, they are greedy. They prefer easy explanations, they prefer silver bullets, they prefer gods and guns for law and order even if we know that education and equality is the answer.

Corporatism, not capitalism.

What's the difference? Capitalism is always going to end up with consolidation, monopolisation and anti-user practices.

Capitalism is all about competition.

The magic of capitalism is happening in China right now. You have hundreds of manufacturers making everything, driving prices down.

In the US, we're more like a command economy in many ways. We have these huge sectors like healthcare and defense that are 100% top down procurement and probably represent 30% of the economy. Another 8% of the economy is financial services, which is mostly a small cartel with direct government supports.

The telecom situation is the same thing. The corporate idiots bake out risks and the US turns into a dinosaur. Lots of real innovation will start happening in Asia.

Capitalism is exactly why you have nice things. Someone figures out what people want, how much they will pay, and then they go about providing it. Others catch on and compete and everyone benefits.

What is happening here is that too many bench warmers are trying to make excuses for why there are enough subscribers to the site. After all, all these people how can't they get a paltry 25k.

Simple, not that many people really know about their site and of those apparently the bulk just don't care. Maybe the content isn't really that interesting. Call a spade a spade.

then throw in, there is just such a wealth of information out there that it is easy to get lost and any one trying to sell stuff is going to have to work very hard to get noticed and even harder to make the sell.

Greed doesn't require capitalism, it occurs about any place where someone has stuff other people don't and where government leadership plays off the feelings of jealousy, income differences, and racial differences. Greed requires politicians who are more quite capable of telling you someone else has stuff you don't have and it is not fair or that you deserve stuff for free... provided you vote for them

There is no way I would pay anywhere close to 120$ per year for a digital magazine. The magazine is a beautifully printed with amazing illustrations on premium paper. Looking at them on a tiny screen would suck.

Indeed, I got a lifetime digital subscription when they offered them. They probably shouldn't have made it lifetime, they should have made it 3 years or something reasonably generous instead of outrageously generous.

Looks like the lifetime prime digital subscription[1] is back for $99. Just signed up. Hope this will help bridge the funding gap and help them pay their backlogged freelancer invoices.

[1] http://shop.nautil.us/lifetime-prime-membership/

You can't charge that for a digital version though. This is one of the very problems. The perception would be that they are simply competing with every other free blog out there filled with content.

I have only heard of one person who made it work with a reasonable margin and that is Maria Popovo from http://www.Brainpickings.org but she is an anomaly.

You are exactly right. This seems like the kind of thing we they need to run more linear with their growth instead the normal "just get traction and monetize later" plan. The big challenge is what if you can never get the monetization to work then your burn just kills you and you have to shut it down. Additionally for journalism, there is no mega corp to come along and buy your users up to bail you out.