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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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?
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link