RIP PC Mag

David Dorn laments the passing of an institution in UK computing and ponders the future…

I don’t know – you nip off for a fortnight in the sun and when you get back everything’s changed. PC Magazine, long a staple of the computing enthusiast’s diet has closed, taking two of its stablemates with it.

Now, for me, this is a sorry sign. The reasons for the closure have not been made abundantly clear, but my money’s on the rapidly progressing advertising slump that we’ve seen over the last couple of years. Let me explain.

Revenue

Paper magazines have a strange model for making money, really. The cover price you pay gets split up between three major revenue takers – the newsagent, the distributor and the publisher. Generally speaking, if a magazine costs £3.00, £1.50 or so of it will be split between the newsagent and distributor, and the publisher will get the rest. Out of that £1.50, the paper and printing has to be paid for (never mind the editorial) and, you may be intrigued to know, quite often the £1.50 isn’t actually enough to cover those costs.

Frequently, the publisher may take £1.50 for a magazine that costs £2.00 to produce. The shortfall is made up by the sale of advertisements, and any profit the magazine makes is usually generated from the same source.

If advertising revenue, then, drops below a certain level, the publishers have to make a decision – do they hike the cover price, reduce the editorial pagination or close the magazine?

If they decide to up the cover price of the magazine, you can bet that you’d end up paying closer to a tenner for it, and that’s a price that the market will not sustain, no matter how good the magazine is. Inevitably, then, when advertising revenue falls, magazines close.

In some ways, it’s a sort of natural and regular occurrence. Going back to the sixties and seventies, there was a plethora of magazines devoted to Microwave Cookery – all sorts of titles, amounting to maybe 20 or 30 magazines a month appearing on the shelves. As Microwaves became more mainstream and began to appear more like clones of each other (again, a natural phenomenon) the number of titles dwindled and dwindled, until now there’s probably not one of them left.

The same sort of thing has been happening over the last three years or so in the computing market. Now, though, things are somewhat different – we have The Internet! As more and more folks have discovered the delights and facilities that you’re enjoying now, they’ve discovered that they can get the information they need more or less for free, and they can also keep tabs on new products direct from their makers’ Web sites. This tends to obviate the need d for advertising in paper magazines, which drives down the revenue the mags make.

Put those two factors together, and my prediction is that we’ll see a gradual downward spiral in the number of paper magazines devoted to PCs – there’ll be a slight upturn in Internet mags, which will not last all that long, and another in beginner’s tutorials, which may be sustained a little longer, but, in the end, I reckon there’ll be a maximum of four titles on the news-stands.

Online

My fervent hope, being the editor of an online PC magazine, is that the paper magazine downturn doesn’t translate into the online magazine end of things, and that we can maintain a high enough readership to remain successful. Thankfully, we’ve noted a year on year growth over the last four years to the point where our readership rivals mainstream paper magazines’ web-sites and beats a large percentage of them – and we’ve got you to thank for that!

So, while I’m lamenting the demise of a magazine I thought highly of, I’m also optimistic that Practical PC can continue to provide you, our reader, with the service that you want, as and when you want it.

SO, why not tell a friend about us, and get them type keyword PPC into their AOL browser?

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David Dorn