I'm trying to find the blog source for this. I want to post it right away because it is (Lisa Simpson voice) "Apt!". It reminds me of the Story of Stuff, an online twenty-minute documentary that is worth a snippet of your time this weekend.
Here’s what Husni told me via email when I put the question to him:
The major problem with our industry is we always undercharged for our content. With few exceptions, we made reader feel that they did not have to pay the REAL price for our products. In the U.S. and since the 1950s we adapted the advertising driven model rather than the circulation driven model where people rather than advertisers pay for the magazine. Our audience has become accustomed to the fact that $20 will bring them 52 issues of Time or Newsweek, yet the same $20 will not pay to be connected to the Internet at home. The average American household pays $68 a month to connect to cable television (up from nothing) and you do not hear them complaining.
Simply stated, find a method in which you make your money from the readers and viewers and not from the advertisers. Roy Reiman did it with not one, but 12 different magazines starting from a basement in his house to an empire that was sold to Reader’s Digest for $760 million. Yes, read that again, $760 million. He NEVER sold an ad in any of his magazines. (Charging for the content is our future….staying dependent on a third party to survive is going to be like that sugar coated poison pill that sooner or later will kill us.
Copyright 2006, Public Broadcasting Service
This is why we spend time defining what Beyond is - how we see it as a portable art gallery and a way of removing barriers to art access, how we love being involved in the paper arts and how we want to make Beyond(s) into art objects. It's a hard thing to define in the light of disposable publishing and hiding real costs but we'd like to take it on.
Update: the source found at the bottom of this page at Mr. Magazine.
