casualty of blogging
Valleywag has a pretty interesting item about a new trade magazine that just launched. While the blog takes a snarky approach in its coverage of Blogger and Podcaster, pointing out the irony of a print magazine about the online media that are supposedly supplanting traditional journalism. While one of the comments points out that trade magazines offer the potential for greater revenue, if not profits, than blogs, I’m still kind of suspicious of the viability of this “book.” When I worked for technology trades, gosh, half-a-decade ago the most profitable properties in the company were the email newsletters that served as an adjunct to the print magazines. Granted, I left in 2002, at the bottom of the tech bust, but the low costs of email publication and the reliable advertisers made purely online properties more attractive. The demise of InfoWorld as a print product only confirms my suspicions that IT trade reporting will increasingly move to the ‘net.
This isn’t to say that I don’t think there are advertisers for a book like Blogger and Podcaster. About six months ago, I wanted to write a post about my bemusement of “podcasting” packages from audio vendors like BSW. I wondered if the podcasting phenomenon was sufficiently large for creating specialized bundles, but I do imagine that podcasting has opened up a new customer base for audio vendors, and persons who want to do DIY audio production might do well with one of these bundles. (I’d say the same thing for vlogging and video, but I think consumers are more apt to already have some kind of video setup.) Of course, magazines and particularly trade magazines are driven by advertising niches, rather than reader demand, so I suspect that Blogger and Podcaster is an effort to sell advertising to vendors like BSW who are comfortable with print advertising and want to sell their wares to an emerging group of customers.
