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Notes -
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?
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.)
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