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Comment by anonymouz | Hacker News Reader

LWN seems to be doing fine, they also have a geek audience. The Humble Bundle also seems to be doing just fine without DRM.

I think with quality content people would pay for it. Not enough to make anyone rich, but certainly enough to fund the publication. By targeting iOS only he is missing out on a huge part of the geek universe as potential customers.

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Marco Arment just uses the tools he likes to use. I think it’s as simple as that. I don’t think building a website (with paywall, payment processor, etc.) is his idea of fun. By doing it the way he did it he keeps it simple and makes it possible to let this continue to be a one man operation.

It’s very much an experiment and if it doesn’t work he will stop (http://the-magazine.org/1/foreword). That’s it. It’s not an affirmation of the supremacy of iOS as a publishing platform or a subtle diss at Android. It just is.

Much as I appreciate LWN (and subscribe), my understanding is that it is losing money. Jon posts periodic updates on this.

At least you don't lose access to LWN just because you upgraded your OS or switched platforms.

Talk to me about G+ and chromium getting fubared due to Debian bug #682616.

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=682616

Edit: clarifying, G+ tends to strongly favor chromium, and the latter's broken as of my most recent update.

But, yeah.

There's a difference between a bug and being tied to a platform for one application. To be fair, you can always switch to another OS (or even another distro) and use chromium.

While I largely agree (and have found that G+ actually is pretty usable under FF16), the point I was highlighting is that Google are (for somewhat understandable reasons) pushing very hard at the concept of what a Web browser is, and what it's used for (they really, really want it to be an app platform, not just a media presentation tool), to the extent that their site degrades significantly under other browsers. Which creates a pain point when Google's own browser fails to function under my preferred OS.

And I don't really see scrapping that OS just to use a single website. There are other alternatives (VMs, etc.), but they're not particularly attractive either.

The IOS6 specificity of The Magazine really is pretty brain-damaged though.

If it makes enough money on iOS, I'm sure it will be ported to other platforms.

That's what the world needs, a magazine that needs to be "ported".

Heh. Worse: web pages that need to be "ported" (e.g., to old versions of IE).

>LWN seems to be doing fine

So, how do we know they are doing fine? It seems they have a bare bones website with some news. Looking at a sponsors page, I see a single company. I don't see any signs of them making real money.

Do we have any info on their financials?

Jon does post roughly annual updates as dredmorbius pointed out; this is the last one I could find on a quick search: https://lwn.net/Articles/504952/ That's probably slightly more positive than others, which typically seem to be along the lines of "scraping by, subscriber counts are roughly static".

(Please consider subscribing by the way! Lwn is a fantastic resource in my opinion, and I'd hate for it to go away).

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