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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3516 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 6, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Is the magazine business viable in 2026? On one hand, obviously no. Subscriptions to magazines have been falling continuously since like 1980 or something.

But on the other hand, maybe yes? Magazines used to be insanely profitable. There is an anecdote about Conde Nast employees in the 1990s getting mad because they were forced to fly first class to their Christmas party in London instead of taking the Concorde that they were used to. There's still some magazines like Architectural Digest which must be absolute cash cows if they can keep their costs under control.

In the modern era, it would be trivially easy to produce a decent magazine with a couple of full time staff. Get a few thousand subscribers and it might be viable. Would people buy a non-shitty version of Wired?

Growing up I would read a ton of magazines, in highschool I probably read 6 or 7 different magazines every month. My dad would take me to the bookstore in my town and buy me whatever magazine I wanted. When I went away to college I had to pay for the magazines myself so I stopped buying them. I kept thinking about how nearly everything I use online is free- youtube, blogs (circa 2009) and so on, funded by ads, and how there were so many ads in every magazine I wanted to read, and how the good fashion magazines were so expensive even with so many ads. I didn't understand why they had to keep raising prices for the media when they were mostly probably funded by the advertising and I found it irritating to pay for something filled with ads. Lots of museums offer free admission now, you just pay for parking- why couldn't magazines be free and just get funded by the advertising? Wouldn't certain advertisers love to be in a free publication that people don't even have to pay to be exposed to?

Google Ads, if I recall correctly, cost on the order of $0.01 per impression. Even if we assume advertisers were willing to pay 10 times as much per print "impression" (questionable, since those can't be targeted as well and don't have a link you can bait people into clicking), how many ads would be needed in a magazine to recoup the writing, printing and distribution costs? If this is like $10 per copy (which seems like a realistic ballpark figure given the price at which glossy ad-free magazines are sold), there would have to be about 100 ads in it.

That's how the London Metro newspaper works, and these days I think also the Evening Standard.

I wish more publications operated that way. The $40 fashion magazine in the era of endless free entertainment baffles me (though I guess it makes me want them more since most people wouldn't pay for it. Maybe that's the secret.)

Would people buy a non-shitty version of Wired?

Oh man, I happened upon a 1999 Wired stuck in an old box of papers last weekend. The thing was so thick it had a spine and while visually bold had content for hours. The list price was $5.95 which inflation calculator tells me would be about $11.99 today. Seems steep for a magazine but probably worth it!

I would probably buy (as in, subscribe to) a non-shitty magazine about any of my interest areas, given a reasonable cost. Having something to read on the can is great. I am only partly joking here - since I spend most of my waking working hours behind the screen, a change of scenery when I am resting really feels nice to me. It's not about efficiency now but about the feel. However, I would not pay for a crap magazine that has 60% ads, 30% AI slop and the rest maybe interesting to me once in a blue moon. It must be consistently good. I don't know whether there are enough people like me to sustain a publication - maybe not. But I personally would.

Yeah, any AI content would have to be heavily suppressed. But it can be really useful as a research assistant. It's getting shockingly good at that. And research is most of the work anyway, so AI would majorly speed up the process. I bet it could do some decent layout work too, although this is far, far removed from anything I've ever worked on.

I don't mind if the writer uses AI as much as they want in the research. But if they just work as a meat proxy between LLM and myself, then the added value is close to zero. I can talk to an LLM directly when I want to. If I pay for something - and increasingly, that includes paying attention - I want to have added value that is not available in LLM prompts. If somebody does not want or is not capable of providing it, surely I am not going to pay for it.

Yes. The writer must have a voice and they must have taste. But good enough research is much easier nowadays. (I’ll define good enough as better than 90% of mainstream news articles)

Part of the issue with magazine economics is that subscriptions did not used to cover all of their costs, advertising did. But targeted advertising prices have plummeted due to google and meta, so magazines lost a major revenue driver.

Newspapers stay in business because they can target eg couponers for advertising based on geography, consumer habits(old housewives change their habits less than young people), and daily circulation, and thats still dicey.

Newspapers stay in business

Some do, anyway, with increasing difficulty. Circulation peaked in around 1990 and the decline still hasn't slowed. The one I interned for as a kid was shut down ... nearly 20 years ago now.

It's generally not a great idea to try to enter, or even to be among the last to leave, a shrinking industry. Status quo bias and loss aversion are serious things, so most of the people you'll be playing musical chairs against will be playing harder than you'll want to.

As I understand it there are really only four English-language newspapers that have ‘thrived’ since the big collapse.

The first is the New York Times, which built a very successful online subscription business on a highly diversified model, almost the newspaper equivalent to a full service MMO that has PvE, PvP, housing, crafting, LARPing, whatever. So the NYT signs people up for puzzles and games, for the weddings and modern love sections, for the book reviews, for the extensive cooking section, for the boomer liberal commentary, and for regional and national news, all of which are well staffed, and then that all feeds into the same pot, they cross-sell you on everything even for the things they let you subscribe to separately, and then they upsell you to the $400/year ‘All Access’ subscription.

The second and third are the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, which superceded all the regional and local business papers and became de facto central reporting for financial markets where information is key to arbitrage, any client conversation, etc. They sell subscriptions directly and through third-party platforms like Refinitiv and Bloomberg, have lucrative events businesses, and go niche enough in terms of reporting that there aren’t free alternatives online if you want to read specific reporting on sub-niches in like investment grade credit funds or competition in the custodian business etc, it’s not something that CNN or the BBC news website can replace. They also still have a very large highly-paid audience which means both digital and print advertising continues to generate some income because luxury brands like to advertise with them.

The last is the Daily Mail which replaced a lot of the tabloid / gossip mag business not just in the UK but across the US and the rest of the Anglo countries and works on an extreme economy of scale with digital ads and an optional extra gossip premium subscription and a very large social media presence. The globalization of celebrity culture and media was helpful here, as is Page Six and the National Enquirer making some strategic mistakes that allowed the DM to take marketshare.

—

Beyond them you have legacy big regional papers like the Chicago Tribune, WaPost, LA Times, SF Chronicle that mainly survive as passion projects of rich men willing to lose money for long periods of time, I don’t think any are consistently profitable.

The economics is relatively 'easy', but I'd caution that the costs are higher than you'd expect. Printing is a scale service, but shipping mostly isn't, and the point where you're spending more to ship something than to print it comes around 50-200 units depending on what service, quality, and printing type you're going for. And that's domestic; if you have to ship international, you're spending more on postage than on per-unit production day one.

((This, coincidentally, is why merch and collections get pushed so hard; after production and shipping costs are included, these things end up being the highest per-unit profit, even if the sales are seldom massive in total revenue.))

The business model is hard. Subscriptions can cover a lot, but as Substack demonstrates, there's little relationship between the quality of a writer, the utility or correctness of their output, and how many people actually subscribe. Having good access or technical chops help get an audience, but there's a tension where these are resources that can be 'spent': access gets devalued if you're not critical enough and gets pulled if you are critical, expertise invites followers-on and there's limits to the extent of domain knowledge.

Traditionally, having the information first helped, but in this era that's a lost cause. You can't beat twitter to be the first to the scene, only be the first person to realize something was important.

There's also a bit of a conflict between sales model and content:

  • Subscription works best with regular content drops and constant (and reliable!) production cycle, which typically pushes people to novelty or topical current-day events, which has the benefit where you have more consistent income, but also need to keep hitting that schedule, and both secular trends or a snafu can cost you a ton. That's workable for traditional news-and-reviews, cutting-edge research, or topical focuses.
  • Bulk sales favor 'timeless' content and you can eventually make a surprising amount from sales of your back catalogue or 'collections', but the competition is harder (literally everyone who published in this field ever), maintaining that back catalogue can be expensive or literally messy, and maintaining customers is a lot trickier while your revenue goes feast or famine. Great for art or fiction.
  • Sponsorship is the tricky option, where your product is a side effect of something else getting the real focus. That doesn't have to be conventional advertising: a lot of prints that make this work are loss leaders for businesses that need to show customers how to use their products, or coalitions showing why the entire class of product exists. It can also be direct advertising, with the caveat that unless your magazine is literally Architectural Digest or defense industry, you probably aren't getting any real money here. It works in some domains, and often better than 'traditional' sales or subscription for them - a lot of maker electronics stuff pivoted hard to it for a reason - but for a thousand-subscriber group, it's rarely going to be worth the time chasing the leads.

One very unintuitive thing is the sheer disconnect between the scope of your plausible sales audience and your plausible revenue. A periodical targeting hobbyist electronics seems like it should be able to print money on subscriptions alone, but there's a road paved with skulls: there's a million teachers who need your product and literally can't buy it for their use case, and your actual sales venue is people bored in a line at Microcenter on a shelf your small zine won't get on. The market cap, the 'success' stories and well-known cases, for scifi/fantasy review publishing, like Locus, have the sort of actual subscriber base that would disappoint a high school newspaper. You just can't do that market, period. On the flip side, there's been successful mags focused on (SFW!) niche-of-niche furry products that made great side gigs or whole one-person shops, because you can have ten thousand people show up at your table, wanting to spend money, over a weekend.

The genius move is magazines for kids. They make great gifts, and because the audience ages out of the focus range you can just reprint the same content on a cycle (a magazine targeting preschoolers can just keep printing the same 2 years of content to new groups of kids).

Sort of. Audience acquisition is very expensive, and kid magazines, by definition, constantly have acquisition costs. The Cricket model where kids graduate to new levels of content is not bad, but the market can only get so saturated. I doubt that even Cricket has yet reached a point of stable subscriptions.

Do they still have zoo books?

That's actually genius. No one wants to read. But people want to want to read. Ergo, the way to sell reading material is when it's a gift for someone else. Bonus points if its educational, since then it's not just a magazine, it's like a textbook which is more expensive.

We'll make one version targeting the aspirational Chinese/Indian parent, and another for woke white parents. Like Ranger Rick, but with gay penguins and stuff.

I assume that Highlights is still around?

This article (originally written in year 2014, but revised since then) lists a zillion possible reasons for the death of fan magazines ("zines").

One active magazine pays five cents per word to authors. I don't know whether that's low or high.

I do still see a little “zine” publication in the OSR RPG space. It’s more than a couple steps removed from its predecessors.

One more recent matter that's killed them off, and not listed on the FanLore, is the pivot to ISBN'd book and anthology sales on a less formal schedule. Between the Kindle market, print-on-demand services, convention sales venues, and increased shipping costs, the conventional business model stopped looking anywhere near as compelling.

Which is a pity, because what's left did lose something from it.

Yeah, it's clear the magazine industry as we know it is dead. And fiction magazines are the deadest of the dead. I'd propose that instead of paying authors, magazines charge them to appear. No doubt many do.

But dead things can have a second life. Kind of like how people might churn butter as a hobby or something.

I'm envisioning a magazine with lots of pictures and low information density that you can just casually thumb through. You can put it on your coffee table, and its a more genteel alternative to scrolling. People might want that sort of experience and it feels high status. Obviously you'll never get the subscription numbers that magazines used to get. Instead you keep costs low and hope for 10,000.

I'm envisioning a magazine with lots of pictures and low information density that you can just casually thumb through. You can put it on your coffee table, and its a more genteel alternative to scrolling. People might want that sort of experience and it feels high status.

So National Geographic, but with fewer words?

Sounds like a good idea. But instead of hiring rugged, good looking photojournalists to travel around with an expense account, seducing lonely housewives, we are just going to buy amateur photographs for like $100 a pop, maybe less.

I wonder if you could bulk license IG photos for less than that?

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