The fall of technology magazines?
Forbes has an article that details the fall of the technology magazine industry. Tech mags are losing advertising dollars and in some cases are going out of business.
However, the article notes that this is because many of those dollars are transferring online. Technology blogs and websites are soaking up advertisement budgets. The article doesn’t seem to make the logic jump that the tech publishing industry isn’t dying, it’s simply changing.
Wired Magazines is a good example of a tech publication that is adapting to this change. They maintain a print publication that is also published online. Not only that, they also have web-only content that includes several blogs. As advertising bleeds from their print pages, they’re able to catch some of them as they go online. Of course, a good portion of advertising will be dispersed to thousands of blogs that receive fewer than a hundred visitors a day through Google’s Adsense program. One could argue that it would be better for one person to receive a full-time position than for 100 bloggers to get a tiny $30 every month from Google. But this really just increases the competition even more. Bloggers and tech writers have to achieve such a high quality of writing that they can get the majority of advertising dollars that are going online.
