6 ms·

One of the problems is that they're shipping dead trees. No way is this economically sustainable these days. They should have gone all digital and raised their

One of the problems is that they're shipping dead trees. No way is this economically sustainable these days. They should have gone all digital and raised their prices long ago. Let's do some math - how many subscribers do they need to break even if they pare down staff, go all digital, and raise their price a bit? Hand-wavy numbers for minimal viable staffing, but should be order of magnitude correct: $ 600,000 Freelancers, $5K per article, 20 articles/issue, 6 issues/year $ 200,000 2 editorial $ 100,000 1 marketing person, online marketing savvy $ 100,000 2 support staff (clerical, PA, etc) $ 200,000 2 management/fundraising/operations staff $ 100,000 1 webmaster/IT person $ 100,000 outsourced services (HR, payroll, website hosting, etc) $1,400,000 annual burn rate assuming a minimal staff to run just the online magazine and dump print (I acknowledge they have other expenses, but let's ignore them for now) If you charge $60 for an annual subscription - very reasonable for the content - they would need 23333.33 subscribers to break even. They got $1.2 million last year in grants, some $9.5 million in funding since 2012. If they can't manage to attract 24K subscribers with that kind of funding they don't deserve to stay in business no matter how good their content is. I love their content, but they need somebody who knows how to run a business to be in charge.

anigbrowl 9y ago
But look, there's a bigger problem here. Maybe they can't get 34k subscribers because it's hard to get people to cough up $60 a year, have all their subscription data resold yadda yadda. You say the problem is dead-tree publishing but I don't think the additional layout and printing costs are so much bigger than what you've outlined above. They're trying to cut costs by not paying the people who actually produce the content (as opposed to those who package it through the editorial function); their other alternative is to produce more popular content that would attract more ad revenue, but that would mean a loss of quality because markets don't always reward quality. This is, literally, why we can't have nice things.
- kebolio 9y ago
  Capitalism is why we can't have nice things in the first place. Capitalism precludes news media from reporting fairly and accurately rather than pander to their advertisers. Another example: want cheap fast internet? Too expensive to run fibre even though these corporations are making profits that run into billions and none of the US giants will have this so-called "common carrier" policy.
  - pas 9y ago
    It's not "capitalism", it's human nature. We like cheap stuff. And the bystander effect. It's free online, so someone else will surely solve it, pay for it, fund it, support it, etc.
    - kebolio 9y ago
      Yes, it is to do with "capitalism" and the product of a society geared towards making money instead of making cool stuff. It isn't immutable, there are better ways of doing things, but then again that's beyond the scope of the argument. :^)
      - pas 9y ago
        No, it's not. Capitalism is private ownership of capital, which means there's a whole lot of economic activity generated by thinking about what to invest in, which is just a blind optimization process. Society could harness it for good or bad. We have cheap applied science things (microprocessors with radios and amazing magically touch sensitive displays without ugly cords with endless content and ability to just call each other anywhere* on the planet), and we have of course things like the great firewall of china (and turkey and so on) which do deep packet inspection, enabled by very similar technology companies. But it's immutable. You can't choose the second best thing. Because that just means your preferences and thus your utility function values underdogs above topdogs, hence you'll see those as the best. It's just tautological. And sure, we'll probably climb out of this hole eventually, but maybe with things like patreon and co: http://alternativeto.net/software/patreon/ http://alternativeto.net/software/patreon/ (for example AdBlock + Flattr seems like a good solution to the advertising hell) Furthermore, just to talk about the original point of "capitalism is killing quality news" ... are you sure? I mean there are still quality news outlets, and there will be, but the problem is that people don't read them. And bias. Even if you could sign up to be a journalist and magically get a fixed income if at least 10 000 people are reading your stuff, there would be a lot more crazy/spam out there. _Because_ people are people, they cheat, they like easy solutions, they are greedy. They prefer easy explanations, they prefer silver bullets, they prefer gods and guns for law and order even if we know that education and equality is the answer.
ingenuous2 9y ago
After seeing this, I was reminded I forgot and let my sub lapse. I go to their site to subscribe, and they are selling a year of the print & digital for $29. That's insane -- they don't even add on postage fees anywhere in the checkout process. It's literally $29, out the door. I signed up for 2 years and just hope they are around for that time. I can't believe the direct costs of printing and shipping such a beautiful magazine don't exceed $5 per issue (12 issues over 2 years for $60). Maybe they have found how price sensitive consumers are for their content, or maybe they know they can get higher ad rates with more print, but I don't see how they're even covering their costs for printing and shipping this to me, much less content or editorial staff, etc.
- rublev 9y ago
  >It's literally $29, out the door. Yeah I didn't really get that. I kept looking for a * somewhere to indicate that it's $29 monthly. I'd have no problem doing monthly. $29 out the door is absolutely insane.
  - lobster_johnson 9y ago
    Note that the price is a special limited offer sale. It's normally $59/year. And it's only 6 issues per year.
- dangrossman 9y ago
  > I can't believe the direct costs of printing and shipping such a beautiful magazine don't exceed $5 per issue A few Quora answers put the cost of printing a typical magazine at less than $1 per copy. Magazines have a special postage rate that's cheaper than a single first class stamp. That means printing and sending the print magazine could cost just about half of what you're paying for the subscription, leaving the other half to pay for the content and overhead.
  - ingenuous2 9y ago
    Nautilus' print edition is a beautiful magazine, definitely can't be compared to a typical print mag. It's the quality of a National Geo mag, I think.
binarycrusader 9y ago
Indeed, I got a lifetime digital subscription when they offered them. They probably shouldn't have made it lifetime, they should have made it 3 years or something reasonably generous instead of outrageously generous.
- otoburb 9y ago
  Looks like the lifetime prime digital subscription[1] is back for $99. Just signed up. Hope this will help bridge the funding gap and help them pay their backlogged freelancer invoices. [1] http://shop.nautil.us/lifetime-prime-membership/ http://shop.nautil.us/lifetime-prime-membership/
snarf21 9y ago
You are exactly right. This seems like the kind of thing we they need to run more linear with their growth instead the normal "just get traction and monetize later" plan. The big challenge is what if you can never get the monetization to work then your burn just kills you and you have to shut it down. Additionally for journalism, there is no mega corp to come along and buy your users up to bail you out.
jonstokes 9y ago
This may be the most Hacker News comment I've ever seen. There are some sectors of the magazine industry, maybe science isn't one of them, that are actually doing really well. I've been on three different junkets with outdoors magazine editors in the past 6 months, and many large brands that advertise to the Duck Dynasty crowd are abandoning digital and going back to print. Digital, it turns out, is mostly a scam. I've written in other places about why this is, but the nutshell version is bad ROI metrics and, even worse, the incentives on all sides are so perverted that the bad metrics and rampant fraud are a fundamental structural/business problem that no amount of tech can solve. At any rate, the jig is, increasingly, up on digital (FB and Google excepted, because they run genuine performance advertising platforms at a scale that nobody else can match), and advertisers are actually going back to print, TV, radio -- venues where the ROI metrics are old, established, widely agreed upon, and fairly reliable. Anyway, this situation is very complex and very very very different from what the typical HN "dead tree is expensive and for losers, the future is digital!" commenter thinks. If anything is in real trouble right now for deep structural reasons, it's digital, not print. You probably find all this hard to believe -- I did at first until I heard it confirmed by the sixth or seventh person. I know that what I just said sounds like "up is down, and black is white", but this is how it is in 2017.
- macNchz 9y ago
  I really like print magazines...I have a print subscription to the New Yorker, New York Magazine and the Sunday NYTimes. The serendipitous discovery of interesting content, the ability to just grab it on the way out the door and the paper format make for a great experience. I think print based reading material will have a place for longer than most people would have predicted a few years ago.
- mcguire 9y ago
  For corroboration, check the begging notes at the bottom of Guardian articles and the recent enhancements of the NYT paywall.
  - goldenkey 9y ago
    The begging is just so they can get free money. They know their audience are a bunch of saps. It is greed more than desperation.
yread 9y ago
There is no way I would pay anywhere close to 120$ per year for a digital magazine. The magazine is a beautifully printed with amazing illustrations on premium paper. Looking at them on a tiny screen would suck.
ThomPete 9y ago
You can't charge that for a digital version though. This is one of the very problems. The perception would be that they are simply competing with every other free blog out there filled with content. I have only heard of one person who made it work with a reasonable margin and that is Maria Popovo from http://www.Brainpickings.org http://www.Brainpickings.org but she is an anomaly.

anigbrowl 9y ago

But look, there's a bigger problem here. Maybe they can't get 34k subscribers because it's hard to get people to cough up $60 a year, have all their subscription data resold yadda yadda. You say the problem is dead-tree publishing but I don't think the additional layout and printing costs are so much bigger than what you've outlined above. They're trying to cut costs by not paying the people who actually produce the content (as opposed to those who package it through the editorial function); their other alternative is to produce more popular content that would attract more ad revenue, but that would mean a loss of quality because markets don't always reward quality. This is, literally, why we can't have nice things.

kebolio 9y ago
Capitalism is why we can't have nice things in the first place. Capitalism precludes news media from reporting fairly and accurately rather than pander to their advertisers. Another example: want cheap fast internet? Too expensive to run fibre even though these corporations are making profits that run into billions and none of the US giants will have this so-called "common carrier" policy.
- pas 9y ago
  It's not "capitalism", it's human nature. We like cheap stuff. And the bystander effect. It's free online, so someone else will surely solve it, pay for it, fund it, support it, etc.
  - kebolio 9y ago
    Yes, it is to do with "capitalism" and the product of a society geared towards making money instead of making cool stuff. It isn't immutable, there are better ways of doing things, but then again that's beyond the scope of the argument. :^)
    - pas 9y ago
      No, it's not. Capitalism is private ownership of capital, which means there's a whole lot of economic activity generated by thinking about what to invest in, which is just a blind optimization process. Society could harness it for good or bad. We have cheap applied science things (microprocessors with radios and amazing magically touch sensitive displays without ugly cords with endless content and ability to just call each other anywhere* on the planet), and we have of course things like the great firewall of china (and turkey and so on) which do deep packet inspection, enabled by very similar technology companies. But it's immutable. You can't choose the second best thing. Because that just means your preferences and thus your utility function values underdogs above topdogs, hence you'll see those as the best. It's just tautological. And sure, we'll probably climb out of this hole eventually, but maybe with things like patreon and co: http://alternativeto.net/software/patreon/ http://alternativeto.net/software/patreon/ (for example AdBlock + Flattr seems like a good solution to the advertising hell) Furthermore, just to talk about the original point of "capitalism is killing quality news" ... are you sure? I mean there are still quality news outlets, and there will be, but the problem is that people don't read them. And bias. Even if you could sign up to be a journalist and magically get a fixed income if at least 10 000 people are reading your stuff, there would be a lot more crazy/spam out there. _Because_ people are people, they cheat, they like easy solutions, they are greedy. They prefer easy explanations, they prefer silver bullets, they prefer gods and guns for law and order even if we know that education and equality is the answer.

ingenuous2 9y ago

After seeing this, I was reminded I forgot and let my sub lapse. I go to their site to subscribe, and they are selling a year of the print & digital for $29. That's insane -- they don't even add on postage fees anywhere in the checkout process. It's literally $29, out the door. I signed up for 2 years and just hope they are around for that time. I can't believe the direct costs of printing and shipping such a beautiful magazine don't exceed $5 per issue (12 issues over 2 years for $60). Maybe they have found how price sensitive consumers are for their content, or maybe they know they can get higher ad rates with more print, but I don't see how they're even covering their costs for printing and shipping this to me, much less content or editorial staff, etc.

rublev 9y ago
>It's literally $29, out the door. Yeah I didn't really get that. I kept looking for a * somewhere to indicate that it's $29 monthly. I'd have no problem doing monthly. $29 out the door is absolutely insane.
- lobster_johnson 9y ago
  Note that the price is a special limited offer sale. It's normally $59/year. And it's only 6 issues per year.
dangrossman 9y ago
> I can't believe the direct costs of printing and shipping such a beautiful magazine don't exceed $5 per issue A few Quora answers put the cost of printing a typical magazine at less than $1 per copy. Magazines have a special postage rate that's cheaper than a single first class stamp. That means printing and sending the print magazine could cost just about half of what you're paying for the subscription, leaving the other half to pay for the content and overhead.
- ingenuous2 9y ago
  Nautilus' print edition is a beautiful magazine, definitely can't be compared to a typical print mag. It's the quality of a National Geo mag, I think.

binarycrusader 9y ago

Indeed, I got a lifetime digital subscription when they offered them. They probably shouldn't have made it lifetime, they should have made it 3 years or something reasonably generous instead of outrageously generous.

otoburb 9y ago
Looks like the lifetime prime digital subscription[1] is back for $99. Just signed up. Hope this will help bridge the funding gap and help them pay their backlogged freelancer invoices. [1] http://shop.nautil.us/lifetime-prime-membership/ http://shop.nautil.us/lifetime-prime-membership/

snarf21 9y ago

You are exactly right. This seems like the kind of thing we they need to run more linear with their growth instead the normal "just get traction and monetize later" plan. The big challenge is what if you can never get the monetization to work then your burn just kills you and you have to shut it down. Additionally for journalism, there is no mega corp to come along and buy your users up to bail you out.

jonstokes 9y ago

This may be the most Hacker News comment I've ever seen. There are some sectors of the magazine industry, maybe science isn't one of them, that are actually doing really well. I've been on three different junkets with outdoors magazine editors in the past 6 months, and many large brands that advertise to the Duck Dynasty crowd are abandoning digital and going back to print. Digital, it turns out, is mostly a scam. I've written in other places about why this is, but the nutshell version is bad ROI metrics and, even worse, the incentives on all sides are so perverted that the bad metrics and rampant fraud are a fundamental structural/business problem that no amount of tech can solve. At any rate, the jig is, increasingly, up on digital (FB and Google excepted, because they run genuine performance advertising platforms at a scale that nobody else can match), and advertisers are actually going back to print, TV, radio -- venues where the ROI metrics are old, established, widely agreed upon, and fairly reliable. Anyway, this situation is very complex and very very very different from what the typical HN "dead tree is expensive and for losers, the future is digital!" commenter thinks. If anything is in real trouble right now for deep structural reasons, it's digital, not print. You probably find all this hard to believe -- I did at first until I heard it confirmed by the sixth or seventh person. I know that what I just said sounds like "up is down, and black is white", but this is how it is in 2017.

macNchz 9y ago
I really like print magazines...I have a print subscription to the New Yorker, New York Magazine and the Sunday NYTimes. The serendipitous discovery of interesting content, the ability to just grab it on the way out the door and the paper format make for a great experience. I think print based reading material will have a place for longer than most people would have predicted a few years ago.
mcguire 9y ago
For corroboration, check the begging notes at the bottom of Guardian articles and the recent enhancements of the NYT paywall.
- goldenkey 9y ago
  The begging is just so they can get free money. They know their audience are a bunch of saps. It is greed more than desperation.

yread 9y ago

There is no way I would pay anywhere close to 120$ per year for a digital magazine. The magazine is a beautifully printed with amazing illustrations on premium paper. Looking at them on a tiny screen would suck.

ThomPete 9y ago

You can't charge that for a digital version though. This is one of the very problems. The perception would be that they are simply competing with every other free blog out there filled with content. I have only heard of one person who made it work with a reasonable margin and that is Maria Popovo from http://www.Brainpickings.org http://www.Brainpickings.org but she is an anomaly.