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Comment by kiba | Hacker News Reader

So it becomes a business, which will focus on generating profit from the magazine, thus Nautilus will become yet another bog standard science magazine subjected to the same structures as other magazines.

And we all know that consumers don't fork enough money to support ads-free journalism, which leads to perverse incentives.

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> And we all know that consumers don't fork enough money to support ads-free journalism, which leads to perverse incentives.

yes they do. susbcription-based models are doing quite well. besides the big heavyweights, in UK alone there are several smaller and successful subscription-based magazines: the TLS, the economist, the spectator etc. in us sports there's 'the athletic' and its clones.

> 'the athletic' and its clones

None of which have actually taken off their runway as far as I know.

Indeed. This is the first time I've heard of it.

> several smaller and successful subscription-based magazines: ... the economist, ...

Maybe I am misreading, but did you mean to imply that The Economist is a 'small' newspaper? It has been around since the 1840s.

compared to the best known subscription success stories -- the NYT, WP -- it certainly seems significantly smaller. but i agree, that comparison isn't very valid, it's certainly a heavyweight amongst magazines.

Is WP WaPo or something else? WaPo went for only a few hundred million when sold. Economist around the same time was valued 3-5x more at $1B. Did WaPo turn things around that much? Economist is mostly owned by super rich elite families, so prestige would’ve entered what they paid too. But WaPo was purchased by Bezos so not likely he was super skimpy on the price (even being considerably “poorer” back then)

Yeah they did. After being bought by Bezos they made a number of changes that have been for the better. They've turned a profit over the last few years based on their growing subscriber base and their digital publishing business.

Of course they've built it all using AWS and I would love to learn more about how they leverage that platform.

I see. Interesting. I know WaPo used to do deals with Prime too.

Even with that, NYT has to be much bigger and their profit is only around 2x Economists. Economist is pretty big in most metrics.

"Old" doesn't mean "Large".

However, in this case you're right. They have 1.6 million subscribers, 50% are digital.

Interestingly, a 50% digital rate probably puts them far above all of the other "Old" periodicals.

> hus Nautilus will become yet another bog standard science magazine ~subjected to the same structures as other magazines~ that will hopefully pay its contributors now!

https://undark.org/2017/12/13/freelance-writers-nautilus-pay...

Part of the acquisition includes a plan to pay all the contributors debt in full.

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