9 ms·

Hacker Monthly: best of the Internet, printed out, and it’s turning a profit

187 points by duck 15y ago

petercooper 15y ago
Interesting to see the split of 95:5 digital/print. Not a total shocker but it's an excellent data point. I wonder what the break down of people using mobi/Kindle, PDF, and EPUB is. It's also a good demonstration of the value of having paying subscribers rather than running advertising alone. While I don't know Lim's numbers, I've advertised in HM before and saw the early ratecards and suspect the amount isn't even a drop in the ocean compared to the subscriber fees. This is why Lim is earning more than twice what I am on 50k free subscribers ;-) A big "D'oh!" on my part..
- pja 15y ago
  If you have paying subscribers I'm willing to bet that it's also a lot easier to get demographic data from them (after all, they're willing to pay good money for your efforts), which then makes it (IIRC) much easier to sell higher value targeted advertising. Although possibly the HackerNews demographic is pretty obvious regardless :) (Almost every news site you go to that relies on ad income will try and get regular visitors to do some kind of survey every year or so for this reason.)
joering2 15y ago
ok duck, since there are some profits involved, just wondering here when/if HN can go against you and ask you to cease your activity. I am not sure so maybe someone here can answer, but isnt it that HN website owns some sort of copyrights to their website's content even if it was created by other (users)
- joelrunyon 15y ago
  HN is an aggregator. It's a link to other sites - there's no copyright involved.
  - joering2 15y ago
    I would argue that the value is in quality of those links. HNM editor doesnt simply take any articles; this way he could just make loops through an X amount of tech/news sites and reprint. But thats not what takes place here. In other words: he is using Hacker News ecosystem (with all its limitations, votes, points, karmas etc) and based on that formula, he reprints "the best of". Perhaps smart attorney would want to ask him to stop using HN formula to build his catalog, since its obvious that HNM wouldnt get traction if he wouldnt keep high quality articles in it (he does know which articles have quality ONLY thank to HN). But again I am not trying to get the author in any sort of troubles. Its just another thought that would stop me from working on this idea.
    - joelrunyon 15y ago
      There's nothing "copywright-able" about a community. I'm sure PG could give this guy a headache if he really wanted to (as could the authors who's content he's repurposing) but the general consensus of the HN community intrinsically encourages this type of initiative and rewards it when it's well done (just take a look at the revenues). Generally, there's all sorts of ramifications any time you do something worth doing - if you use that as an excuse not to start, you'll never do anything.
      - joering2 15y ago
        Good point; thanks Joel.
- duck 15y ago
  I have nothing to do with Hacker Monthly (bearwithclaws is Lim's HN handle), but I do run Hacker Newsletter (http://hackernewsletter.com http://hackernewsletter.com) and do make a profit, although a magnitude smaller than Lim. With that said I think we both have zero to worry about.
- polyfractal 15y ago
  The only thing they could make a claim about is trademark infringement of "Hacker News". Everything else is content from various authors around the web, which have freely given their permission to allow reprints. All in all, a pretty awesome success story!
  - jerf 15y ago
    Technically, there is a such thing as a "collection copyright": http://www.sacred-texts.com/sect103.htm http://www.sacred-texts.com/sect103.htm But I mention this mostly to be technically correct (the best kind of correct), and for the entertaining prospect of trying to determine exactly who or what actually created the collection in the first place, from a legal point of view. And then it would require whoever that author or set of authors may be to sue, and that's either effectively impossible (the group of submitters) or impossibly unlikely (if the law decided it was YCombinator, because my goodness would that ever be a stupid no-win lawsuit for that entity).
  - MichaelApproved 15y ago
    Hacker News doesn't seem to be trademarked, I see no claim for that anywhere on the site. Even if it were trademarked, the vast amount of sites already using the term Hacker News could cause the trademark to be invalidated since, in order to keep a trademark valid, you must actively defend it from being infringed upon.
    - joering2 15y ago
      most sites that use HN content does not generate profits, at least not so obviously. now, don't get me wrong -- huge kudos to author for pulling this off but me and sure other users here had the similar idea long time ago: a nice, polished thick and colorful catalog full of the 1st page articles even with printed Hackernes comments. The major thing that stopped me, for example, was the thought that if this will get a traction and will bring some profits, most likely HN will come after me to either option A (95% probability) shut this down, or option B (5%) - to work out some sort of a deal. Major reason why HN, Facebook, Youtube, etc etc does not care about someone infringing is because there is no business behind what they do. So most likely they can only "spread the word" which is a good thing. Now, when it comes to generating some profits off of someone else thats a different story. once again to underline this: huge kudos for great idea and awesome execution!
- grellas 15y ago
  The copyright belongs to an author or poster, respectively, depending on whether it is an article or comment. HN gets an implied license to display the comments and cannot be held to infringe from a typical link to an outside article. I have to confess to having felt pretty idiotic when I went many months ordering individual print issues, thinking all along that Hacker Monthly might not last for a full subscription year (in time, I subscribed). This is far and away the most popular item in the reading area of our office, with many, many clients asking for copies of articles from it. It is a great product and I am happy both to subscribe and to feature it for clients. Lim has done something pretty amazing here.
zackzackzack 15y ago
This might be the present I ask for on my upcoming birthday. Yep, I know what I want.
patio11 15y ago
Please keep the success of HNM in mind the next time you hear "Pfft, who pays for information you could find free on the Internet." HN readers just like you also do all sorts of weird things like paying money for software, paying money for services, paying money for media, etc etc. Also might be salutary to remember if sentiment runs, say, 10-1 against doing an idea: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1261499 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1261499 Congrats on the success, by the way.
- alaskamiller 15y ago
  Or if you really think about it... this idea survived long enough and got popular enough to support itself with just 5 out of every 100 people.
  - ohgodthecat 15y ago
    It is probably supporting itself with the other 95 people just as much considering it isn't free for those people (unless of course they are under the year free subscribtion for students that he was offering). There would also be revenue from the advertisements in the magazine. This idea really survives because there is a market for curated content presented in a visually pleasing manner.
- taylorbuley 15y ago
  A difference between this curated magazine and other publishers that balk at putting content online for the reason you state is that the information used here by HNM was already published by the time of print. Content is expensive, depreciates after publish time and the majority of its value is realized within moments of publication. Here the content (though here not design) is cheap and its co-branding with Hacker News is free. It's a great model for new business models that skirt content creation or bolt-on groups inside big publishers, but I don't think it's too valuable a comparison when dealing with publishers whose key differentiation is a particular editorial slant on content creation.
  - itmag 15y ago
ebcase 15y ago
I love Hacker Monthly — I just subscribed a few weeks ago so I could read it via Kindle, and am making my way through its back-issues (to which subscribers get access).
bobbles 15y ago
Can anyone explain something for me.. I'm interested in subscribing to the print edition. Does subscribing mean I also receive the back-catalog to issue #1 in print also? (This is what I'd like). Thanks
- joejohnson 15y ago
  Yes, subscribers receive access to all issues, including the back catalogs.
  - tagawa 15y ago
    Really, for print edition? Surely that's not viable long-term.
    - charliepark 15y ago
      I think the back-catalog access is digital-only.
    - bobbles 15y ago
      Yeah.. this is what I'm still unsure of.. what I'd like is to order the print subscription, and then receive all of the back issues to #1, and start receiving the new issues each month. Im located in australia, so I dont know how this would work. (The $88 subscription price already increases to $174, just for postage to AUS)
      - enneff 15y ago
        I subscribed to the print edition from Australia. You get digital-only access to the back catalog. The exchange rate makes it around AUD$165, which is less than $14 an issue.
- bearwithclaws 15y ago
  The back issue access is for digital only :)
smsm42 15y ago
There's probably a lot of opportunities in news aggregation on multiple level. My RSS feeds list on Google Reader is way longer than I can manage to read. If I had a clone (i.e. somebody who knows exactly what I find interesting) I'd definitely have him do that and tell me just the interesting stuff. Absent that, paying somebody to do a good approximation of it would be reasonable, if it's not too expensive.
enneff 15y ago
I was skeptical of Hacker Monthly when it was first announced. I haven't been following it, but on seeing this article I was so impressed I subscribed to the print edition right away. A great excuse to spend less time on HN. :-)
- cgs 15y ago
  Same here. Don't forget, it's a tax writeoff if you're self-employed :)
HiroshiSan 15y ago
Congrats to Lim for his success, I remember my question being featured in issue #1 although I was never mentioned as the poster of the question, not a big deal but hahaha little fame is nice.
shawnc 15y ago
Happy to see he gets permission to reprint each first. That's good. This seems like a great idea and I'm happy to see it's working well. I thin curation is something everyone wants in some regard. And the interesting tibit is, Hacker News is already 'User Curated' so half the work is being done for Lim already.
fady 15y ago
wow! i love reading posts like this. kudos lim for doing this, and i love the graphics used too.
Kilimanjaro 15y ago
They should put it on the App Store as a monthly magazine using iBooks Author. Believe me when I say it is really easy to do and the user experience is worth every penny. I know Lim can do it himself in his sleep but if a helping hand is needed just let me know.
gruseom 15y ago
This is just astonishing. Many congratulations!
kandalf 15y ago
It's cool to note that any student can get a digital subscription for free (something that I take advantage of). It would also be cool if he sold a box set of 2011's issues - or even better a bound compilation.
nigelsampson 15y ago
Congratulations on the success, I'd love to subscribe to the print version, but the delivery costs to New Zealand are 95% of the subscription cost.
verelo 15y ago
I think this is a great idea but i really do find the price ($88 + shipping of $42 to Canada) a bit high. I'm sure a lot of effort goes into this so i'm not saying its not worth it, i'm just not prepared to pay this much given that there are many other magazines out there (with less direct inspiration, so i can only assume they are harder to generate) that are a lot cheaper. Having said this, well done...im very glad its working out and turning a profit.
- Kartificial 15y ago
  I was about to subscribe, the 88$ is reasonable for a nice printed copy. But for the Netherlands (i know, overseas) the shipping is 84$ which really discouraged me. Great initiative though :)
neilk 15y ago
I refused to license something to Lim and it had nothing to do with wanting to be paid. I just felt weird taking a comment in a conversation and turning it into a standalone piece, isolated from the context. Not sure how I feel about it now. I also thought that the audience for his publication was going to be smaller and less interesting than the audience on HN itself anyway. Clearly I was very wrong. Sorry for doubting.
andrewphelps 15y ago
You guys, if enough people vote up this post it will be printed in Hacker Monthly. #meta
pellias 15y ago
Now, how viable is it to do a reddit monthly ?
- bvi 15y ago
  The only way to know for sure is to actually do it. Go for it.
- sireat 15y ago
  This would be a humongous undertaking. In fact, a better idea would do one for one of the big subreddits. The N/S on reddit is much higher than HN thus your task would be much harder. I really like the idea of HNM, the need for quality editorial guidance in the age of information overload is something that has been discussed many times, starting with Alvin Toeffler.
- jmcqk6 15y ago
  It does exist: The Redditor: http://www.reddit.com/r/theredditor http://www.reddit.com/r/theredditor I think they're digital only at the moment, though.
f4stjack 15y ago
Y'know what this magazine reminded me of? The glory days of 2600: Hacker Quarterly. Sure, it is still active but... I feel they kinda lost the touch with what we care today. I got my bundle in Christmas and liked it immensely. Sure, it is aggregated information and you can find it on the internet for free but... sometimes you need to have some articles on print for ease of access and you have to admit finding an old article in HN involves a little bit of pain... Great job!
timharding 15y ago
Is there a plan to profit share with authors at some point? Will the editor simply continue to rule out those that ask for payment for their work? Presumably there's some reasonable profit that the editor must take out for himself to sustain and grow the magazine and there are reasonable costs beyond that. What after that? I fully understand that authors opt-in. I understand that authors have varied reasons for opting-in. Just curious to see if there's a business model that feeds back into the community.
lionhearted 15y ago
Lim Cheng Soon is a super great guy too. Friendly, down-to-earth, family values, massive work ethic, helpful, appreciation for beauty and aesthetics, good friend, just really stellar dude. Anyone passing through Malaysia should drop him a line to link up. One of the nicest people I've met in the last couple years.

187 points by duck 15y ago

Interesting to see the split of 95:5 digital/print. Not a total shocker but it's an excellent data point. I wonder what the break down of people using mobi/Kindle, PDF, and EPUB is. It's also a good demonstration of the value of having paying subscribers rather than running advertising alone. While I don't know Lim's numbers, I've advertised in HM before and saw the early ratecards and suspect the amount isn't even a drop in the ocean compared to the subscriber fees. This is why Lim is earning more than twice what I am on 50k free subscribers ;-) A big "D'oh!" on my part..

pja 15y ago
If you have paying subscribers I'm willing to bet that it's also a lot easier to get demographic data from them (after all, they're willing to pay good money for your efforts), which then makes it (IIRC) much easier to sell higher value targeted advertising. Although possibly the HackerNews demographic is pretty obvious regardless :) (Almost every news site you go to that relies on ad income will try and get regular visitors to do some kind of survey every year or so for this reason.)

joering2 15y ago

ok duck, since there are some profits involved, just wondering here when/if HN can go against you and ask you to cease your activity. I am not sure so maybe someone here can answer, but isnt it that HN website owns some sort of copyrights to their website's content even if it was created by other (users)

joelrunyon 15y ago
HN is an aggregator. It's a link to other sites - there's no copyright involved.
- joering2 15y ago
  I would argue that the value is in quality of those links. HNM editor doesnt simply take any articles; this way he could just make loops through an X amount of tech/news sites and reprint. But thats not what takes place here. In other words: he is using Hacker News ecosystem (with all its limitations, votes, points, karmas etc) and based on that formula, he reprints "the best of". Perhaps smart attorney would want to ask him to stop using HN formula to build his catalog, since its obvious that HNM wouldnt get traction if he wouldnt keep high quality articles in it (he does know which articles have quality ONLY thank to HN). But again I am not trying to get the author in any sort of troubles. Its just another thought that would stop me from working on this idea.
  - joelrunyon 15y ago
    There's nothing "copywright-able" about a community. I'm sure PG could give this guy a headache if he really wanted to (as could the authors who's content he's repurposing) but the general consensus of the HN community intrinsically encourages this type of initiative and rewards it when it's well done (just take a look at the revenues). Generally, there's all sorts of ramifications any time you do something worth doing - if you use that as an excuse not to start, you'll never do anything.
    - joering2 15y ago
      Good point; thanks Joel.
duck 15y ago
I have nothing to do with Hacker Monthly (bearwithclaws is Lim's HN handle), but I do run Hacker Newsletter (http://hackernewsletter.com http://hackernewsletter.com) and do make a profit, although a magnitude smaller than Lim. With that said I think we both have zero to worry about.
polyfractal 15y ago
The only thing they could make a claim about is trademark infringement of "Hacker News". Everything else is content from various authors around the web, which have freely given their permission to allow reprints. All in all, a pretty awesome success story!
- jerf 15y ago
  Technically, there is a such thing as a "collection copyright": http://www.sacred-texts.com/sect103.htm http://www.sacred-texts.com/sect103.htm But I mention this mostly to be technically correct (the best kind of correct), and for the entertaining prospect of trying to determine exactly who or what actually created the collection in the first place, from a legal point of view. And then it would require whoever that author or set of authors may be to sue, and that's either effectively impossible (the group of submitters) or impossibly unlikely (if the law decided it was YCombinator, because my goodness would that ever be a stupid no-win lawsuit for that entity).
- MichaelApproved 15y ago
  Hacker News doesn't seem to be trademarked, I see no claim for that anywhere on the site. Even if it were trademarked, the vast amount of sites already using the term Hacker News could cause the trademark to be invalidated since, in order to keep a trademark valid, you must actively defend it from being infringed upon.
  - joering2 15y ago
    most sites that use HN content does not generate profits, at least not so obviously. now, don't get me wrong -- huge kudos to author for pulling this off but me and sure other users here had the similar idea long time ago: a nice, polished thick and colorful catalog full of the 1st page articles even with printed Hackernes comments. The major thing that stopped me, for example, was the thought that if this will get a traction and will bring some profits, most likely HN will come after me to either option A (95% probability) shut this down, or option B (5%) - to work out some sort of a deal. Major reason why HN, Facebook, Youtube, etc etc does not care about someone infringing is because there is no business behind what they do. So most likely they can only "spread the word" which is a good thing. Now, when it comes to generating some profits off of someone else thats a different story. once again to underline this: huge kudos for great idea and awesome execution!
grellas 15y ago
The copyright belongs to an author or poster, respectively, depending on whether it is an article or comment. HN gets an implied license to display the comments and cannot be held to infringe from a typical link to an outside article. I have to confess to having felt pretty idiotic when I went many months ordering individual print issues, thinking all along that Hacker Monthly might not last for a full subscription year (in time, I subscribed). This is far and away the most popular item in the reading area of our office, with many, many clients asking for copies of articles from it. It is a great product and I am happy both to subscribe and to feature it for clients. Lim has done something pretty amazing here.

zackzackzack 15y ago

This might be the present I ask for on my upcoming birthday. Yep, I know what I want.

patio11 15y ago

Please keep the success of HNM in mind the next time you hear "Pfft, who pays for information you could find free on the Internet." HN readers just like you also do all sorts of weird things like paying money for software, paying money for services, paying money for media, etc etc. Also might be salutary to remember if sentiment runs, say, 10-1 against doing an idea: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1261499 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1261499 Congrats on the success, by the way.

alaskamiller 15y ago
Or if you really think about it... this idea survived long enough and got popular enough to support itself with just 5 out of every 100 people.
- ohgodthecat 15y ago
  It is probably supporting itself with the other 95 people just as much considering it isn't free for those people (unless of course they are under the year free subscribtion for students that he was offering). There would also be revenue from the advertisements in the magazine. This idea really survives because there is a market for curated content presented in a visually pleasing manner.
taylorbuley 15y ago
A difference between this curated magazine and other publishers that balk at putting content online for the reason you state is that the information used here by HNM was already published by the time of print. Content is expensive, depreciates after publish time and the majority of its value is realized within moments of publication. Here the content (though here not design) is cheap and its co-branding with Hacker News is free. It's a great model for new business models that skirt content creation or bolt-on groups inside big publishers, but I don't think it's too valuable a comparison when dealing with publishers whose key differentiation is a particular editorial slant on content creation.
- itmag 15y ago

ebcase 15y ago

I love Hacker Monthly — I just subscribed a few weeks ago so I could read it via Kindle, and am making my way through its back-issues (to which subscribers get access).

bobbles 15y ago

Can anyone explain something for me.. I'm interested in subscribing to the print edition. Does subscribing mean I also receive the back-catalog to issue #1 in print also? (This is what I'd like). Thanks

joejohnson 15y ago
Yes, subscribers receive access to all issues, including the back catalogs.
- tagawa 15y ago
  Really, for print edition? Surely that's not viable long-term.
  - charliepark 15y ago
    I think the back-catalog access is digital-only.
  - bobbles 15y ago
    Yeah.. this is what I'm still unsure of.. what I'd like is to order the print subscription, and then receive all of the back issues to #1, and start receiving the new issues each month. Im located in australia, so I dont know how this would work. (The $88 subscription price already increases to $174, just for postage to AUS)
    - enneff 15y ago
      I subscribed to the print edition from Australia. You get digital-only access to the back catalog. The exchange rate makes it around AUD$165, which is less than $14 an issue.
bearwithclaws 15y ago
The back issue access is for digital only :)

smsm42 15y ago

There's probably a lot of opportunities in news aggregation on multiple level. My RSS feeds list on Google Reader is way longer than I can manage to read. If I had a clone (i.e. somebody who knows exactly what I find interesting) I'd definitely have him do that and tell me just the interesting stuff. Absent that, paying somebody to do a good approximation of it would be reasonable, if it's not too expensive.

enneff 15y ago

I was skeptical of Hacker Monthly when it was first announced. I haven't been following it, but on seeing this article I was so impressed I subscribed to the print edition right away. A great excuse to spend less time on HN. :-)

cgs 15y ago
Same here. Don't forget, it's a tax writeoff if you're self-employed :)

HiroshiSan 15y ago

Congrats to Lim for his success, I remember my question being featured in issue #1 although I was never mentioned as the poster of the question, not a big deal but hahaha little fame is nice.

shawnc 15y ago

Happy to see he gets permission to reprint each first. That's good. This seems like a great idea and I'm happy to see it's working well. I thin curation is something everyone wants in some regard. And the interesting tibit is, Hacker News is already 'User Curated' so half the work is being done for Lim already.

fady 15y ago

wow! i love reading posts like this. kudos lim for doing this, and i love the graphics used too.

Kilimanjaro 15y ago

They should put it on the App Store as a monthly magazine using iBooks Author. Believe me when I say it is really easy to do and the user experience is worth every penny. I know Lim can do it himself in his sleep but if a helping hand is needed just let me know.

gruseom 15y ago

This is just astonishing. Many congratulations!

kandalf 15y ago

It's cool to note that any student can get a digital subscription for free (something that I take advantage of). It would also be cool if he sold a box set of 2011's issues - or even better a bound compilation.

nigelsampson 15y ago

Congratulations on the success, I'd love to subscribe to the print version, but the delivery costs to New Zealand are 95% of the subscription cost.

verelo 15y ago

I think this is a great idea but i really do find the price ($88 + shipping of $42 to Canada) a bit high. I'm sure a lot of effort goes into this so i'm not saying its not worth it, i'm just not prepared to pay this much given that there are many other magazines out there (with less direct inspiration, so i can only assume they are harder to generate) that are a lot cheaper. Having said this, well done...im very glad its working out and turning a profit.

Kartificial 15y ago
I was about to subscribe, the 88$ is reasonable for a nice printed copy. But for the Netherlands (i know, overseas) the shipping is 84$ which really discouraged me. Great initiative though :)

neilk 15y ago

I refused to license something to Lim and it had nothing to do with wanting to be paid. I just felt weird taking a comment in a conversation and turning it into a standalone piece, isolated from the context. Not sure how I feel about it now. I also thought that the audience for his publication was going to be smaller and less interesting than the audience on HN itself anyway. Clearly I was very wrong. Sorry for doubting.

andrewphelps 15y ago

You guys, if enough people vote up this post it will be printed in Hacker Monthly. #meta

pellias 15y ago

Now, how viable is it to do a reddit monthly ?

bvi 15y ago
The only way to know for sure is to actually do it. Go for it.
sireat 15y ago
This would be a humongous undertaking. In fact, a better idea would do one for one of the big subreddits. The N/S on reddit is much higher than HN thus your task would be much harder. I really like the idea of HNM, the need for quality editorial guidance in the age of information overload is something that has been discussed many times, starting with Alvin Toeffler.
jmcqk6 15y ago
It does exist: The Redditor: http://www.reddit.com/r/theredditor http://www.reddit.com/r/theredditor I think they're digital only at the moment, though.

f4stjack 15y ago

Y'know what this magazine reminded me of? The glory days of 2600: Hacker Quarterly. Sure, it is still active but... I feel they kinda lost the touch with what we care today. I got my bundle in Christmas and liked it immensely. Sure, it is aggregated information and you can find it on the internet for free but... sometimes you need to have some articles on print for ease of access and you have to admit finding an old article in HN involves a little bit of pain... Great job!

timharding 15y ago

Is there a plan to profit share with authors at some point? Will the editor simply continue to rule out those that ask for payment for their work? Presumably there's some reasonable profit that the editor must take out for himself to sustain and grow the magazine and there are reasonable costs beyond that. What after that? I fully understand that authors opt-in. I understand that authors have varied reasons for opting-in. Just curious to see if there's a business model that feeds back into the community.

lionhearted 15y ago

Lim Cheng Soon is a super great guy too. Friendly, down-to-earth, family values, massive work ethic, helpful, appreciation for beauty and aesthetics, good friend, just really stellar dude. Anyone passing through Malaysia should drop him a line to link up. One of the nicest people I've met in the last couple years.