Hacker Monthly: best of the Internet, printed out, and it’s turning a profit | Hacker News Reader

Hacker Monthly: best of the Internet, printed out, and it’s turning a profit

niemanlab.org

187 pointsduck64 comments

Please keep the success of HNM in mind the next time you hear "Pfft, who pays for information you could find free on the Internet." HN readers just like you also do all sorts of weird things like paying money for software, paying money for services, paying money for media, etc etc.

Also might be salutary to remember if sentiment runs, say, 10-1 against doing an idea: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1261499

Congrats on the success, by the way.

Patrick, at the risk of sounding ungrateful to all your help, I'd like to point out that HNM's success is also a good counterpoint to the advice you give again and again - "Don't make stuff for 20-something Cauc(asian) dudes. It has no hope of making money." In this particular instance, it appears to make more than software for schoolmarms.

_By selling the dudes' own words back to them, nonetheless!_

The more advice I read, the more I'm convinced that if you're in the business of making new things that haven't been done before, ignore all advice. Just fucking do it.

I don't recall saying you can't make money selling to the usual suspects. Clearly you can -- that is why they're the usual suspects. I just don't think it is a particularly wise move when more attractive markets abound.

I don't think that comparing BCC to HNM provides meaningful signal on that question. (Philosophically, by the way, when somebody mentions that X makes more than me my first thought is "Ooh, congrats!" and I don't usually bother with a second thought.)

My comparison was crude. I know there are finer nuances, such as BCC income probably being much more passive than HNM.

I just don't think it is a particularly wise move when more attractive markets abound.

The irony of that coming from the maker of bingo software is not lost on me :-P

In any case, I'm sorry if I misunderstood and misrepresented your advice.

EDIT: It occurred to me that my snide remark regarding the irony could also do with a disclaimer. I'm implying that you yourself chose BCC over other attractive markets. However, I know you did that at a time it made sense to you given your circumstances. You have since moved towards more attractive markets (AR). This example clearly highlights the problem with advice. Unless it is seen in the context of the adviser's whole spectrum of experience, it can be really misleading and confusing.

"Pfft, who pays for information you could find free on the Internet."

I'm in exactly that boat, as I run a magazine as well and have been thinking those thoughts. I even use the same print on demand company as HNM (Magcloud).

Seeing this I'm much more interested in trying to make some money. Any ideas are much welcome! :)

Twenty-one issues later, the magazine has about 4,700 subscribers worldwide, Lim said. Annual subscriptions cost $88 for the print edition or $29 for the digital .mobi/.epub/.pdf bundle. Only five percent of subscribers get the print version, he said, but that’s still a tidy sum of about $20,000 on top of an estimated $130,000 in subscriptions per year. He also sells full-page ads.

Holy fuck! I'm beginning to see that I have some SERIOUS limiting beliefs about the possibility of making money like this. I've never made a single dollar because I didn't even think it was worth trying. Serious inspiration value here!

If I had that kind of money coming in I could release an issue every month, easy peasy (getting the content has never been the bottleneck for me, rather it's the graphic design side of things (I use a volunteer who works for free in her spare time)).

Anyone who has any input on how to monetize my magazine, please contact me now!

1. Make it an iMagazine using iBooks Author

2. Give it for free on the AppStore

3. Monetize using full page ads

Why free? the whole idea is to have eyeballs so you can charge for premium ads.

Or you can charge from 0.99 to 4.99 depending on how selective or captive the content is, like finance, law, etc.

There is a ripe market for disruption nobody has tamed yet, everybody can design and publish their own magazine with little effort and there are millions of possible categories from fashion to tech, nature, biking, sailing, etc.

The newsstand icon in my iPad is always empty but that's about to change.

Right there, as more and more iMagazines pop up, the need to design full-page ads increases, creating a new market on its own, giving birth to a new ad network.

There is plenty of money to be made, all we need is imagination and dedication.

Right. And maybe a startup is needed in the iMagazine advertisement niche? Matching up magazines and advertisers, doing analytics, running campaigns, that sort of thing.

This actually sounds quite interesting to me...

Charge money for it.

Charge money for advertising in it.

How about this:

Keep the PDFs free to download.

Have a Member's Support Brigade (stolen concept from thesurvivalpodcast.com) which includes free e-books from other people and coupons for other people's products.

Charge for print copies.

Sell a subsciption which gives you a special Ipad version or whatever.

Put in ads.

Sell a "best of" volume via Lulu.com.

Make our own spin-off e-books and sell.

Merchandise (t-shirts, stickers, etc).

Amazon store (books we recommend, stuff like that).

Use kickstarter.com to raise money for specific sub-projects (like "start a hackerspace").

Any more ideas?

I'd add that everyone knows about paying for a subscription to a magazine and everyone knows about paying for advertising so you won't have to teach people about the value (or not) of those two things.

Alternatively just copy the Hacker Monthly business model, apply it to your content. It seems to work and it would be easy to copy.

You're overcomplicating things. Pick the simplest idea to implement and then test it by offering it to the market. See if it works, go from there. And just do one thing to start with.

A difference between this curated magazine and other publishers that balk at putting content online for the reason you state is that the information used here by HNM was already published by the time of print. Content is expensive, depreciates after publish time and the majority of its value is realized within moments of publication.

Here the content (though here not design) is cheap and its co-branding with Hacker News is free. It's a great model for new business models that skirt content creation or bolt-on groups inside big publishers, but I don't think it's too valuable a comparison when dealing with publishers whose key differentiation is a particular editorial slant on content creation.

Content is expensive, depreciates after publish time and the majority of its value is realized within moments of publication.

I don't know if that's always true. I've never paid for an article and we only use 100% original content (ie was written for us first and foremost).

Also, no one says the content has to depreciate. I just looked through some back issues, and there's lots of stuff I would want to (re-)read again. For example:

Cyberpunk tribes: From networks to phyles

Picking up girls with the 8 circuit model

Self Development Ninja Style

On the awesome meaninglessness of life

Mind hacking: 3 ways to increase your intelligence

How to not fail at New year’s resolutions

The Hackerspace as bat-cave and lifestyle-lab

How to arouse a woman

Designing your life and living your dreams

The Memory palace: A venerable technique for remembering historic dates, your shopping list and phone numbers of random girls

You just gotta focus on timeless topics like, uh, personal development, ninjas, and picking up girls :p

Or if you really think about it... this idea survived long enough and got popular enough to support itself with just 5 out of every 100 people.

It is probably supporting itself with the other 95 people just as much considering it isn't free for those people (unless of course they are under the year free subscribtion for students that he was offering).

There would also be revenue from the advertisements in the magazine.

This idea really survives because there is a market for curated content presented in a visually pleasing manner.

Thanks, Patrick!

Interesting to see the split of 95:5 digital/print. Not a total shocker but it's an excellent data point. I wonder what the break down of people using mobi/Kindle, PDF, and EPUB is.

It's also a good demonstration of the value of having paying subscribers rather than running advertising alone. While I don't know Lim's numbers, I've advertised in HM before and saw the early ratecards and suspect the amount isn't even a drop in the ocean compared to the subscriber fees. This is why Lim is earning more than twice what I am on 50k free subscribers ;-) A big "D'oh!" on my part..

If you have paying subscribers I'm willing to bet that it's also a lot easier to get demographic data from them (after all, they're willing to pay good money for your efforts), which then makes it (IIRC) much easier to sell higher value targeted advertising. Although possibly the HackerNews demographic is pretty obvious regardless :)

(Almost every news site you go to that relies on ad income will try and get regular visitors to do some kind of survey every year or so for this reason.)

Y'know what this magazine reminded me of? The glory days of 2600: Hacker Quarterly. Sure, it is still active but... I feel they kinda lost the touch with what we care today.

I got my bundle in Christmas and liked it immensely. Sure, it is aggregated information and you can find it on the internet for free but... sometimes you need to have some articles on print for ease of access and you have to admit finding an old article in HN involves a little bit of pain...

Great job!

Is there a plan to profit share with authors at some point?

Will the editor simply continue to rule out those that ask for payment for their work?

Presumably there's some reasonable profit that the editor must take out for himself to sustain and grow the magazine and there are reasonable costs beyond that. What after that?

I fully understand that authors opt-in. I understand that authors have varied reasons for opting-in. Just curious to see if there's a business model that feeds back into the community.

I refused to license something to Lim and it had nothing to do with wanting to be paid.

I just felt weird taking a comment in a conversation and turning it into a standalone piece, isolated from the context. Not sure how I feel about it now.

I also thought that the audience for his publication was going to be smaller and less interesting than the audience on HN itself anyway. Clearly I was very wrong. Sorry for doubting.

I think this is a great idea but i really do find the price ($88 + shipping of $42 to Canada) a bit high. I'm sure a lot of effort goes into this so i'm not saying its not worth it, i'm just not prepared to pay this much given that there are many other magazines out there (with less direct inspiration, so i can only assume they are harder to generate) that are a lot cheaper.

Having said this, well done...im very glad its working out and turning a profit.

I was about to subscribe, the 88$ is reasonable for a nice printed copy. But for the Netherlands (i know, overseas) the shipping is 84$ which really discouraged me.

Great initiative though :)

Happy to see he gets permission to reprint each first. That's good.

This seems like a great idea and I'm happy to see it's working well. I thin curation is something everyone wants in some regard. And the interesting tibit is, Hacker News is already 'User Curated' so half the work is being done for Lim already.

They should put it on the App Store as a monthly magazine using iBooks Author. Believe me when I say it is really easy to do and the user experience is worth every penny.

I know Lim can do it himself in his sleep but if a helping hand is needed just let me know.

I was skeptical of Hacker Monthly when it was first announced. I haven't been following it, but on seeing this article I was so impressed I subscribed to the print edition right away. A great excuse to spend less time on HN. :-)

Same here. Don't forget, it's a tax writeoff if you're self-employed :)

It's cool to note that any student can get a digital subscription for free (something that I take advantage of).

It would also be cool if he sold a box set of 2011's issues - or even better a bound compilation.

Congrats to Lim for his success, I remember my question being featured in issue #1 although I was never mentioned as the poster of the question, not a big deal but hahaha little fame is nice.

I love Hacker Monthly — I just subscribed a few weeks ago so I could read it via Kindle, and am making my way through its back-issues (to which subscribers get access).

There's probably a lot of opportunities in news aggregation on multiple level. My RSS feeds list on Google Reader is way longer than I can manage to read. If I had a clone (i.e. somebody who knows exactly what I find interesting) I'd definitely have him do that and tell me just the interesting stuff. Absent that, paying somebody to do a good approximation of it would be reasonable, if it's not too expensive.

Now, how viable is it to do a reddit monthly ?

This would be a humongous undertaking. In fact, a better idea would do one for one of the big subreddits.

The N/S on reddit is much higher than HN thus your task would be much harder.

I really like the idea of HNM, the need for quality editorial guidance in the age of information overload is something that has been discussed many times, starting with Alvin Toeffler.

It does exist:

The Redditor:

http://www.reddit.com/r/theredditor

I think they're digital only at the moment, though.

The only way to know for sure is to actually do it. Go for it.

You guys, if enough people vote up this post it will be printed in Hacker Monthly. #meta

Can anyone explain something for me.. I'm interested in subscribing to the print edition. Does subscribing mean I also receive the back-catalog to issue #1 in print also? (This is what I'd like).

Thanks

The back issue access is for digital only :)

Yes, subscribers receive access to all issues, including the back catalogs.

Really, for print edition? Surely that's not viable long-term.

Yeah.. this is what I'm still unsure of.. what I'd like is to order the print subscription, and then receive all of the back issues to #1, and start receiving the new issues each month.

Im located in australia, so I dont know how this would work. (The $88 subscription price already increases to $174, just for postage to AUS)

I subscribed to the print edition from Australia. You get digital-only access to the back catalog. The exchange rate makes it around AUD$165, which is less than $14 an issue.

I think the back-catalog access is digital-only.

Congratulations on the success, I'd love to subscribe to the print version, but the delivery costs to New Zealand are 95% of the subscription cost.

This might be the present I ask for on my upcoming birthday. Yep, I know what I want.

This is just astonishing. Many congratulations!

wow! i love reading posts like this. kudos lim for doing this, and i love the graphics used too.

ok duck, since there are some profits involved, just wondering here when/if HN can go against you and ask you to cease your activity. I am not sure so maybe someone here can answer, but isnt it that HN website owns some sort of copyrights to their website's content even if it was created by other (users)

The copyright belongs to an author or poster, respectively, depending on whether it is an article or comment. HN gets an implied license to display the comments and cannot be held to infringe from a typical link to an outside article.

I have to confess to having felt pretty idiotic when I went many months ordering individual print issues, thinking all along that Hacker Monthly might not last for a full subscription year (in time, I subscribed). This is far and away the most popular item in the reading area of our office, with many, many clients asking for copies of articles from it. It is a great product and I am happy both to subscribe and to feature it for clients. Lim has done something pretty amazing here.

I have nothing to do with Hacker Monthly (bearwithclaws is Lim's HN handle), but I do run Hacker Newsletter (http://hackernewsletter.com) and do make a profit, although a magnitude smaller than Lim. With that said I think we both have zero to worry about.

The only thing they could make a claim about is trademark infringement of "Hacker News". Everything else is content from various authors around the web, which have freely given their permission to allow reprints.

All in all, a pretty awesome success story!

Technically, there is a such thing as a "collection copyright": http://www.sacred-texts.com/sect103.htm

But I mention this mostly to be technically correct (the best kind of correct), and for the entertaining prospect of trying to determine exactly who or what actually created the collection in the first place, from a legal point of view. And then it would require whoever that author or set of authors may be to sue, and that's either effectively impossible (the group of submitters) or impossibly unlikely (if the law decided it was YCombinator, because my goodness would that ever be a stupid no-win lawsuit for that entity).

Hacker News doesn't seem to be trademarked, I see no claim for that anywhere on the site. Even if it were trademarked, the vast amount of sites already using the term Hacker News could cause the trademark to be invalidated since, in order to keep a trademark valid, you must actively defend it from being infringed upon.

IAAL. Don't go too far thinking that existence of a trademark depends on whether you see a (TM) or (R). The touchstone of trademark law is whether your branding will make customers think you're related to someone who was in the space before you. If you're confusing customers, you have a problem; if you're not, you don't. Having an (R) makes it easier for the earlier entrant to prove infringement and collect damages, but it's not the end of the story.

(So for example in this case, when you say that the number of sites using the term Hacker News invalidates the trademark, what you mean is that no reasonable customer would think Paul Graham sponsors HNM, because the term Hacker News isn't associated with this site in particular. That's, let's say, up for debate.)

Trademark is actually one of the sanest areas of IP. It's pretty much about whether the alleged infringer is hurting consumers or not. I've fantasized sometimes about what would happen if you applied the same principle to patent or copyright ...

[Disclaimer: This is so not legal advice. Don't be an idiot.]

most sites that use HN content does not generate profits, at least not so obviously.

now, don't get me wrong -- huge kudos to author for pulling this off but me and sure other users here had the similar idea long time ago: a nice, polished thick and colorful catalog full of the 1st page articles even with printed Hackernes comments. The major thing that stopped me, for example, was the thought that if this will get a traction and will bring some profits, most likely HN will come after me to either option A (95% probability) shut this down, or option B (5%) - to work out some sort of a deal.

Major reason why HN, Facebook, Youtube, etc etc does not care about someone infringing is because there is no business behind what they do. So most likely they can only "spread the word" which is a good thing. Now, when it comes to generating some profits off of someone else thats a different story.

once again to underline this: huge kudos for great idea and awesome execution!

But which law would HN use to compel you to shutdown your project?

-Not trademark because there is none here.

-Not copyright because you can't copyright facts. You might get them on the structure of the facts (this bit of info is first, that bit is second and this is third) but with a site like HN, there is no fixed structure, except that at one time this link was in the top X. I believe that's a fact more than structure.

-Comments! Now that's the weak link. If you don't get permission from each commenter, you're likely infringing. HN cant shut you down but they can incourage others to and it only takes one commenter to make your life difficult in this type of publication.

IANAL but this is my understanding. If anyone knows different, please correct me where I'm wrong.

I'm not sure, as I am not an attorney. The basis would be that without Hacker News website, there would be no Hacker News Monthly. It doesn't take a rocket science to imagine that running busy site like HN takes someones time AND money. HNM editor clearly profits off of it, just leaving all the costs to HN and squeezing essence out of it, making reasonable bucks for himself (again: kudos to the author; had I had time and balls to pull this of.... I'm just pointing out what would stop me from putting my time/effort into it)

I guess time will show (if HNM will keep traction) if HN will somehow, anyhow react.

HN is an aggregator. It's a link to other sites - there's no copyright involved.

I would argue that the value is in quality of those links. HNM editor doesnt simply take any articles; this way he could just make loops through an X amount of tech/news sites and reprint. But thats not what takes place here. In other words: he is using Hacker News ecosystem (with all its limitations, votes, points, karmas etc) and based on that formula, he reprints "the best of". Perhaps smart attorney would want to ask him to stop using HN formula to build his catalog, since its obvious that HNM wouldnt get traction if he wouldnt keep high quality articles in it (he does know which articles have quality ONLY thank to HN). But again I am not trying to get the author in any sort of troubles. Its just another thought that would stop me from working on this idea.

There's nothing "copywright-able" about a community. I'm sure PG could give this guy a headache if he really wanted to (as could the authors who's content he's repurposing) but the general consensus of the HN community intrinsically encourages this type of initiative and rewards it when it's well done (just take a look at the revenues).

Generally, there's all sorts of ramifications any time you do something worth doing - if you use that as an excuse not to start, you'll never do anything.

Good point; thanks Joel.

Lim Cheng Soon is a super great guy too. Friendly, down-to-earth, family values, massive work ethic, helpful, appreciation for beauty and aesthetics, good friend, just really stellar dude. Anyone passing through Malaysia should drop him a line to link up. One of the nicest people I've met in the last couple years.

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