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The Perl Journal On The Ropes
rochlin writes "Looks like The Perl Journal might not make it up for air after all. This blurb is on their website. 'Time is running short and we need your help if The Perl Journal is to get another chance at being the real deal. As of a couple of minutes ago, we only have 881 subscriptions and the deadline is fast approaching. Please subscribe now. It only costs 3 cents per day to get the best Perl coverage anywhere.'" They need 3,000 subscribers to move forward.
It's not the fact that they stopped publishing it, but how they treated the subscribers.
Anyone else get fscked out of a year or two of BYTE?
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Who needs Perl Journal when there's Perl Monks? Great resource!
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In a word: Advertising.
Most magazine subscriptions costs just barely, if at all, cover the mailing costs. With an online magazine like this one, fixed costs are a little different, but I am sure they are still planning to rely on advertising to plug the money gap.
Hell, I have a couple "newstand" magazines which the publishers send to me for free to get the ads in front of me, since I fit a valued advertising demographic for them. Think about PCWeek and stuff (are they still around?) I used to get a mailbox full of free computer trade rags each week pro-bono.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
Who needs the New York Times when there's www.newyorktimes.com? Who needs USA Today when there's, you guessed it, www.usatoday.com?
Yes, magazines have probably been but throught market/financial HELL since the web came out, because you can't beat the speed of internet publications as opposed to a paper magazine which usually has a 3 month 'delay'.
You usually get a much higher quality of writing in a traditional magazine, not to mention you can't take a web site from the shitter, to the couch, out on the porch, on the bus, on the shitter at work, in the drive through at mcdonalds....
I'm thinking you didn't pursue your money very far then. The original subscriptions were honored by the transition to TPJ as a section of SysAdmin. Quite honestly, the transition sucked for a number of reasons, and that's why the partnership ended up failing. But the original subscriptions were honored for anyone Jon could track down (which basically means anyone who bothered to email him asking what the deal was).
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
The rate that a magazine can charge for advertising is directly dependent on the number of subscribers they have - more subscribers, higher ad rates. Probably with under 1000 subscribers they can't charge a high enough ad rate to sustain themselves.
This is why you see airline frequent flier miles can be used for magazine subscriptions. The magazines really want to give away subscriptions to get that subscriber number up, but advertisers insist that the subscribers be 'qualified subscribers' - which is anyone who pays for a subscription, or anyone who meets some other semi-arbitrary standard - like 'a frequent flier with 1000 miles to blow', 'a member of XYZ professional association', etc.
I'd like a perl only magazine - I used haunt the local comp bookstore everytime I knew a new TPJ was coming out. I like dead-tree publications, and I honestly don't understand the "why pay for something I can get free online" crowd for the whole list of usual reasons.
But, I'm not signing up for TPJ this time around. Why?
Strangely enough, for these reasons (especially the last one), I probably would subscribe to "The Scripting Journal." It would have some perl in it it give me that warm fuzzy feeling, and enough other stuff that I do currently work with daily to allow me to justify the time. I enjoy scripting languages, so something like that would be a nice combination of work and play. I fear it's never to be, though, and that I'm stuck with online-only publications.
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I just signed up for TPJ pdf subscription, even though I got burned on the magazine subscription.
I was a subscriber to the TPJ mag since issue #3, and had just sent in my payment for three more years when I received a notice that they were discontinuing The Perl Journal and would begin sending me Sys Admin mag instead to finish out my subscription.
Received one Sys Admin mag in the mail, then nothing...What a deal.
So, I must be a glutton for punishment to send them MORE money, but I really enjoyed TPJ's content and was usually able to apply something from each issue to my daily work.
Twelve bucks a year is a pretty good investment for quality content that TPJ has provided in the past.
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They killed BYTE magazine and ran off with the subscription monies.
I'm not surprised they are having trouble now.
And I'm not moved in the least.
Sorry for the journalists, but your company stinks.
Come on, Perl Journal, it is time to go away.
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My understanding of what happened is that originally Jon was doing TPJ out of the back of his appartment. The quality was superb, both in articles and subscriber service. Then he transferred the subscriber services to Earthweb and retained editorial control. Subscriptions were supposed to be Earthweb's business, they were supposed to know what they were doing. The content continued to be superb, but the subscriber service was bad. Then Earthweb tanked, and after a long hiatus, Jon was able to get SysAdmin (CMP) to include TPJ as a supplement (once) and then they turned it into a section. I may have lost some subscription money in there, but I already subscribed to SysAdmin, so I'm satisfied to the extent I never missed an issue. The content was thin, but I attribute that to the monthly instead of quarterly issues. So my experience can be summarized as: when Jon Orwant is doing it, it rocks. When someone else does it (i.e., for money, not love), it sucks.
So the obvious question for me is: what role is Jon Orwant playing in the current incarnation?