Yes good questions. So MagCloud was introduced to me by the founder of JPGMag (Derek Powazek) and I've been with them since they were beta. They've grown and

Yes good questions. So MagCloud was introduced to me by the founder of JPGMag (Derek Powazek) and I've been with them since they were beta. They've grown and have become a much better service for the 1.5 years I've been with them. They now have perfect binding and international shipping which they didn't have for quite a while. I used to ship the copies international myself and act as sort of a middle man. There quality is amazing, especially since we run a photograph magazine quality is of the utmost importance. I would recommend them for sure. Lulu.com is another option I considered, but I found them to be too complicated. MagCloud was simple, one size, one size bleed, etc. Lulu provided too many options which I didn't like, plus the MagCloud magazine dimensions are pretty good. So actually the price of the mag includes a $1.00 charge for perfect binding so the profit is $0.50 which is more of a counter in how many magazines I've sold. This obviously is a no profit situation. And really a loss when considering all the effort put into it. But the magazine promotes fotoblur, our online community. Our biggest part of the business is the community and the interactions that happen there. We follow a freemium model and it is through the site that we earn real revenue. However, we are looking into making an offering digitally at a price, and we offer our premium members a Digital Edition as part of their upgrade. You're right about the advertising, the magazine distribution numbers are low so advertisers aren't knocking on our door. MagCloud started an iPod app and were were being downloaded 2-300 times a day. This in turn got us a spike in web traffic, more members joining per day, and with 3% converting to Premium numbers of registered members add up to eventual revenue. For the magazine we don't want ads. I've designed it to be minimalistic and focused on the artwork. The newstands photography magazines eventually have turned into pimps for new camera equipment and top ten lists on how to take the best photo ever. We are more grassroots and focused on the artwork. We find that our target readers are the photographers themselves who then want to join the community and become contributors themselves. The website offers lots of ways to have fun like ratings, favorites, followers/friends (twitter-sh), we have community run groups etc. The community aspects are fun and I do love creating the magazine as its a nice break from writing code. By the way, we did publish in the iPad app, but since I offered the digital editions as a premium member only offering there was an obvious conflict. I've since been researching other ways to distribute digitally since this is obviously the future of the publishing industry. With future iPads getting retinal display it will start to rival 300 dpi prints. So I feel that we should be looking into digital distribution channels and not giving that away to push the print. Great reply, I'd love to know what you're working on and I may be able to assist you or answer more questions. You can email me at fotoblur [@] gmail .c0m Cheers