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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2743 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?

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?

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