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Dr. Dobb's 38-Year Run Comes To an End
An anonymous reader writes: Dr. Dobb's — long time icon of programming magazines — "sunsets" at the end of the year. Editor Andrew Binstock says despite growing traffic numbers, the decline in revenue from ads means there will be no new content posted after 2014 ends. (The site will stay up for at least a year, hopefully longer.) Younger people may not care, but for the hard core old guys, it marks the end of a world where broad knowledge of computers and being willing to create solutions instead of reuse them was valuable.
Binstock might disagree; he said, "As our page views show, the need for an independent site with in-depth articles, code, algorithms, and reliable product reviews is still very much present. And I will dearly miss that content. I wish I could point you to another site that does similar work, but alas, I know of none."
They sell a DVD with the 1988-2009 archives on the site. Maybe there will be a last update.
https://store.drdobbs.com
From the article: ... ...
Despite our excellent growth on the editorial side, our revenue declined such that today it's barely 30% of what it was when I started. While some of this drop is undoubtedly due to turnover in our sales staff, even if the staff had been stable and executed perfectly, revenue would be much the same and future prospects would surely point to upcoming losses. This is because in the last 18 months, there has been a marked shift in how vendors value website advertising. They've come to realize that website ads tend to be less effective than they once were. Given that I've never bought a single item by clicking on an ad on a website, this conclusion seems correct in the small.
Makes you wonder how other websites that depend on ad revenue are surviving.
seems to be the pattern of media in general these days...
Deep articles are going the way of the dodo. Not enough ad impressions etc on those as they appeal to a narrow audience.
Shallow product "reviews" and flame baiting on the other hand...
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
No, don't make the ads so obnoxious. I wouldn't block them if advertisers wouldn't pig out on my resources and force me to turn off the sound so I'm not embarrassed or distracted by some loud jingle, with blinking text, frenetic animation, and a flashing background. When ads take more than 5% of my bandwidth, RAM, and CPU, and make my browser unstable, I do something about it. If I have to reposition windows to hide obnoxiously distracting animation, I'll block it. IF it's not easy to block, I'll quit visiting the website.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
You guys know about sites like Computer Magazine Archive and Classic Computer Magazine Archive, right?
(Got my start on Atari 800 w/ the 6502, never looked back... yes, I do have a lawn that I regularly chase kids away from!)