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Ziff Davis Teeters
Longtime Reader writes: "It is a short article with links all over the place, but Linux and Main is running a story that says Ziff Davis might file for bankruptcy this week. The company plans to stay in business by expanding its focus on computer games, the story says." To get you started, reader idiotnot contributes this link to coverage in the NYT.
Hey, that gives me an idea: What pro-Windows lickspittle publications should we go after next?
I hate to see people loose their jobs, but zdnet and pcmag have been useless for over 5 years now. PCMag in particular stop reporting back in 95 and only rehashed PR junk. It is time for new crop of magazines to take the place of all the dead weight in the tech reporting industry. Zd used to have solid in depth articles that were fairly objective. But soon after win95 came out, that all changed. Of course these are my own biased opinions, but I know other techies share similar perspectives.
You should buy wired then, it takes some skill to find the articles!
Enjoy the smirk while you can!
The NYT article said that ZD lost $30 million on Yahoo Internet Life since its launch. I think that's a pretty good reason to close it.
...if they came up with IT Babe of the month. Hot babe of the month...it's a proven magazine publishing strategy!
>> Nobody will accept Ziff Davis doing games.
Huh? They have owned Computer Gaming World for quite a while.
>> Best they stick to what they do but focus their attention at serving their customer base and not catering to the OEMs.
News flash: Their customer base is the OEMs, not the readers. Your paltry few bucks per issue barely covers the cost of postage or distribution. The advertisers pay most of the costs.
* Willis Stein & Partners paid $780 million for the company during the bull market.
* The company's earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization are projected to be $6.5 million in 2002
Translation: At the current rate of profit, it will take over a hundred years to make up the initial investment. Ouch.
I'd just like to point out that it doesn't really work like that. When you buy a company, you don't sit around waiting for the checks to come in so you can get your money back. Well, not just that, anyway.
The key to making your money back is in market capitalization. If I spent $100 million to buy a publicly traded company, then I'm going to hope that the market capitalization (the total value of all outstanding shares of the company's stock, more or less) is equal to or greater than $100 million. Of course, if it were, I couldn't have bought it for $100 million; the owners would have held out for more money.
So what you want to do is lose a little money on the initial sale of the company, then keep the company profitable long enough to increase its market capitalization to a point where the company is worth more than you paid for it. This isn't directly related to the amount of money the company makes each quarter, although that's a factor. It's directly related to the open market share price of the publicly traded shares of company stock.
For instance (I'm too lazy to go digging up numbers, so I'll invent them instead) if ZD has 10 million outstanding shares, and the per-share price today for ZD stock is $50 per share, then the company has a market capitalization of $500 million. (Grossly oversimplified business math, there.) If I tried to sell it today, I'd lose a lot of money, because I paid over $700 million for it.
But if the company continues to make a profit, the stock price will (hopefully) gradually climb to $60, $70, $80 per share. Poof! I've made money, because the company I own (rather, that I own majority shares of) is worth more than I paid for it. I could sell it and make my money back, and then some.
Vapid, chauvenistic, and annoying.
Funny you would describe them that way, as that is exactly how you sounded.
Your first point, about hiring more women. Valid, but not. Take a look at ANY market survey and you will see that the vast majority of gamers are still male. Hell, have you actually read the gamespottings before? I believe a few were of the editors talking about how they married women who just don't play video games and the effect that has on their relationships.
The preview idea is equally short-sighted. They get the preview builds because they are going to be fair towards them. If they start ragging games for what they don't like, especially if the issues are to be addressed by the developers, then they are going to stop getting preview builds.
The competition angle is about the best you have. Unfortunately, the problem most likely is not due to any sort of monopoly, but rather to the fact that magazines are a tough sell. Tougher today then before, now that you can download all you want online. Hell, isn't this entire article about how they (Ziff) aren't even making money?
If you have any good constructive points to make, then by all means make them. But don't just start screaming you suck. And sure as hell don't resort to insulting comments about how the industry evidently doesn't get laid.
Nobody will accept Ziff Davis doing games.
Except for the few million people that already do through subscriptions or rack purchases of "Official US Playstation Magazine", "Xbox Nation", "Electronic Gaming Monthly", "GameNow", or "Computer Gaming World".
At least nobody will be willing to accept that they are impartial.
Anyone that accepts that any game rag is impartial is fooling themself.
The end was obvious for PC Magazine when they started selling advertisements for hair plugs and sex-enhancing herbal supplements (check the marketplace section of their latest issue).
This from a magazine that pulled the plug on advertisements for pr0n sites a few years back. With the pictures they're using now, what's the difference.
Cheer! Here's one woman gamer cheering your comments.
I quit EQ when they redesigned the boobs to be lethal weapons. I'm 33 years old, married, the mother of three kids, and buy WAY more games a year than your average 14 year old gamer. Why? Cause I have a job, and cash to buy them. I buy pretty much whatever catches my fancy. I don't have to save my paper route money, nor do I have to beg my parents for the money.
Attracting new customers should be the goal of every new game. Instead of all those companies catering to the same, tired, cliched gamer, perhaps they should start looking at the gamers everyone forgets.. women. Oh, damn, you know, I forgot, someone already did that... The Sims. And wouldn't you know, its the best selling PC game... EVER.
Catch a clue guys. We're here. We just don't talk to you all cause you are so damn RUDE. You treat us as if we aren't anything more than a pair of breasts and a pussy and that we're on this planet only to provide you with masturabatory material.
Disclaimer: I do not mean all of you. I mean some of you who also replied to this thread. Shouldn't take much brainpower to figure out to whom I am referring.
Having the advantage of being non-US-based, I only know ZDs website. Any decent computer magazine (like the german c't magazine) would put ZDs "articles" in the advertising part only, if not directly in the bin.
Well, seeing how Jesse Berst crawled far into BillGs ass it is not at all surprising that the odeur drove the customers away.
Good Riddance! And (no) good look for Berst at the employment agency...
The ruin of technical magazines started well before the public became aware of the Internet. Most technical magazines started on the slippery slope from containing mostly technical articles to consisting mostly of reviews of commercial equipment long before the World Wide Web came on the scene.
My issue is that ZD is not operating at a loss, but they still plan on putting 700 people out of work, and discontinuing publications that have readership.
To be honest, I'm somewhat astounded at your post. You start off with a set of facts, and then go off the deep end with your conclusion contradicting your facts!
Their not cutting profitable parts of their company, they're cutting the unprofitable parts. Do you really think that they should continue paying 700 employees that are losing money for them?
Now, if you want to make the argument that somehow they should give these losing parts of the company more time to become profitable, that's a different argument, and I (or probably you) don't have enough facts to render a judgment on that.
Once again I have to say: Employees are not 'owed' employment.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.