Is YM getting too posh??

SAWDOC said:
There was a recent thread containing a link to a Dylan Keep turning left video presentation which I thought cut admirably through all of the posh stuff with a few laughs thrown in for good measure!

Here it is

http://www.ybw.com/forums/showthread.php?354107-Our-Dylan-s-2nd-Presentation!
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one of the snags is that it is very hard to attach any advertising to what I do

old boat... no longer in production

old car, old bike, home built canoe

I bought a new outboard... I buy a lot of petrol....I buy rubbish food and boxes of wine

almost nothing that would attract display advertising

the main market for new boats is with the plus 30 footers

they are the only people who buy display adverts

one of the snags is that there are so many old immortal glass fibre hulls around

buying a boat is so cheap now

think of what £12,000 would buy you - an immaculate centaur as good, probably better nick than the day it popped out of the mold

no real need to make new sub 30 foot boats

the poor old mags have also lost the classified adverts to the web... free adverts on boat and outboards

the way we buy chandlery has changed

breaks my heart to contemplate what the future holds for magazines once our generation drops off our perches

I still love picking up a sailing magazine at a the beginning of a railway journey

I don't even have the excuse of taking along as a gift for my father in law anymore

I am not even sure how the online magazines can survive

http://www.eastcoastsailing.co.uk/about.html

is excellent and completely freemans.
 
Apart from the poshness angle jack,it's all dumbed down,I have some 30 yr old YMs and you get 3 dense pages from Mike R etc about ocean nav whereas now its teletubby tips. Spike Marlin good as well,I enjoy my old copies if I need a mag. Who cares if they go bust they deserve it Dylan W is right about the online future. Sleightholme was a massive bore as well. What european yachty mags could anyonee suggest as being good?.
 
Nothing has changed in the last 12 years, it is only the boats that have got more expensive. The pound is down the suwannee and oil and base metals are through the roof the result is a double whammy. You are looking at £500K for a new 45' medium displacement boat, half that for light displacement oth figures are horrendous when you consider wages have not risen significantly in the past five years.
 
I never subscribe to any magazine! I look at the articles that each issue contains and if they are interest I buy that copy, but with the internet purchases are becoming fewer and fewer.
 
jerrytug said:
Apart from the poshness angle jack,it's all dumbed down,I have some 30 yr old YMs and you get 3 dense pages from Mike R etc about ocean nav whereas now its teletubby tips.
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Why would you need to know how to do things like navigate, everyone has a gadget to do that now. No one actually takes a fix and plots it on a chart or works out a secondary port tide and as for using a sextant.... :p
 
photodog said:
Flipping through this months issue which just dropped through my letter slot this am... I found myself getting quiet annoyed at how posh the thing has become... HR on the cover, more HR's used for stuff on the inside... Yet another article by a journalist showing off his unfeasibly large posh boat....another cruise on a new Ancona 430..... More on a ovni... Another hr being reviewed in the new boats... And then the final insult, some posh student taking the family Sweden yacht on a Scottish cruise.

Is it just me or is the mag becoming increasingly out of tune to the average middle aged middle class used production boat owner??

What happened to the normal sailors?
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No photodog. As the rest of the world gets wealthier ( just look at the number of 100k cars on the roads), you have dropped behind. Or at least your frame of reference has. Like me, maybe, you have got meaner as you get olkder. I still reckon Jag sports cars should cost 2k which is what the original one did in my prime, and the present price is ridiculous.

In short the world has moved on and you've stayed still.


P.S. I look at the family accounts and think " I'm rich". Then I divide my net worth by the price of Jag sports cars, find I can buy no more of them now than my late father could at my age, and realise that the problem is my mental frame of reference. The govt RPI is no guide to inflation - thats all about the cost of existence not the cost of buying the sort of things you want to buy and work to buy.
 
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photodog said:
Flipping through this months issue which just dropped through my letter slot this am... I found myself getting quiet annoyed at how posh the thing has become... HR on the cover, more HR's used for stuff on the inside... Yet another article by a journalist showing off his unfeasibly large posh boat....another cruise on a new Ancona 430..... More on a ovni... Another hr being reviewed in the new boats... And then the final insult, some posh student taking the family Sweden yacht on a Scottish cruise.

Is it just me or is the mag becoming increasingly out of tune to the average middle aged middle class used production boat owner??

What happened to the normal sailors?
Click to expand...

In the current economic climate the average middle aged middle class used production boat owner is the person feeling the pinch the most.
Indeed, many are leaving the sport/hobby/... Just walk around any marina - plenty of used production boats on the hard, all called 'For Sale'.
Some marketing undergraduate may well come to the conclusion that posh people are the only ones left with money and boats.
Therefore the perceived shift 'up-market' is probably in line with this.

What I object to more than this perceived shift up-market - and even more than the abundance of adverts or the incessant 'repeats' - is the decline in quality of the writing.
Couple of months ago, I made the mistake of buying a copy of YM in the hope I might learned something new on a subject I was researching at the time. What a waste of money that turned out to be. The subject was covered in a very superficial manner and no practical information could be gleaned from the article. In fact, most of the article seem to consist of copy/paste material from various manufacturers. In short: I learned nothing new.

So, one or two things must have happened over the last decade or so:
1. I must have become very knowledgeable on all matters relating to yachting.
or (and much more likely)
2. Articles are being dumbed down.
 
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jerrytug said:
Apart from the poshness angle jack,it's all dumbed down,I have some 30 yr old YMs and you get 3 dense pages from Mike R etc about ocean nav whereas now its teletubby tips. Spike Marlin good as well,I enjoy my old copies if I need a mag. Who cares if they go bust they deserve it Dylan W is right about the online future. Sleightholme was a massive bore as well. What european yachty mags could anyonee suggest as being good?.
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Indeed.... yet, you read in 'web news/feedback' forum, that they can't get changes done on here, as they have other more important priorities!!!
IPC just don't seem to get it, as far as I can see... this forum is their saviour, yet they are determined to put it near the bottom of the pile.
The paper magazine has had its day, and they need to be ready to move on. The digital world offers SO many opportunities to create richer, more appealing, and therefore higher revenue generating content, but instead we get the same repeated articles through the post every month, with less and less depth.
 
More I think to do with perceptions - median sailing incomes have risen, many of ours have stayed still.

I don't "do" any sailing mags - most are overpriced and contain little if any useful journalistic comment. Really they're big advertising supplements with an unacceptable price stuck on the cover. Every time I happen to pick one up I'm forcibly reminded of that impression.
 
Phoenix of Hamble said:
IPC just don't seem to get it, as far as I can see... this forum is their saviour, yet they are determined to put it near the bottom of the pile.
.
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Go on Phoenix. . Explain to us how a free website is a saviour for a commercial organisation. AKAIK, no newspaper has yet made a stand alone profitable commercial exercise out of the internet not least because most people like me expect what they see on the internet to be free. Just like the music on the internet is / was free.

I reckon the issue is a different one. There really isnt much new in yachting except maybe electronics - and even there , progress isnt that fast. And whilst you read anything and learn from it when you first start to sail, by the time you've benn sailing for a few years your know 90% of what you need to know for your style of sailing. Inevitably then, when you've been sailing like me for more than 20 years, you rarely see anything other than repeats is the mags. Reason is there's nothing really new to write about. Just look at the contents of this months mags and ask yourself - how long have we know that?

The only redeeming factor is that these days I can read and re-read a magazine 20 times simply because my memory is such I've forgotten reading it the previous time round.

And one final comment - how much really new do you see on TV? Wall to wall cookery programs covering just the same formats. Game shows ditto. Even the news has mostly happened before. Life is like that.
 
Bosun Higgs said:
Go on Phoenix. . Explain to us how a free website is a saviour for a commercial organisation.
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OK.... pretty simple really.

They have more access to 'sailing eyeballs' than pretty much any other internet site on the planet.

These 'eyeballs' are generally socio-economic group ABC1, eg marketing wet dream territory.

They also have the potential for more insight into the wants and needs of this group than you could possibly imagine... they know or can have a good guess at the political alignment, the geographic location, the preferences for brands, the usage patterns of boats, etc etc etc....

They could develop features to exploit this relatively easily, that would allow them to make significant money.

A few examples?

Annual engine service packages targeted as users with a specfic engine by pm, email or just targeted on page messaging
Assistance to marina operators to target berth sales efforts
Interest in a new car?
Anchorage, marina, harbour guides, with pre-booking, targeted restaurant messages, access to engineers, etc
Follow the model of 'visit my harbour', with accurate updated charts and lots of pilotage info, all for a small fee
And then at its simplest, gather the knowledge created on here and created targeted content for a premium, focused on the needs of the user, eg windvane info for those planning blue water trips, seacock maintenance guides for first time boat owners etc etc

I could keep going, but you must get the idea.... it's not hard to see a way of generating a few quid per annum from every user... and from some, a lot more.... but without the crude subscription model applied by the newspapers, but by adding lots of value for those users instead.
 
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"The only redeeming factor is that these days I can read and re-read a magazine 20 times simply because my memory is such I've forgotten reading it the previous time round."




As the late George Melly used to say about his illness:

"Alzheimer's is not all bad.........................I meet new friends every day"


We need a new mag: Mouldy ole Boat. The Americans have one:

http://www.goodoldboat.com/




"
 
I doubt its that simple Phoenix. For a start most people use software that prevents pop up ads when surfing. The few that do get through ( Google are a PITA ) are very much resented by me because I hate the idea that software ios watching me and putting forward ads related to what I have viewed. In short its just too much " in your face".

Sooner or later someone will find a way to make money out of web only publishing, maybe even have done by now. But I havent seen it happen yet ( and that includes both acr and bike forums too) and I very much doubt that IPC would be ignoring it if it were possible.
 
Bosun Higgs said:
I doubt its that simple Phoenix. For a start most people use software that prevents pop up ads when surfing. The few that do get through ( Google are a PITA ) are very much resented by me because I hate the idea that software ios watching me and putting forward ads related to what I have viewed. In short its just too much " in your face".

Sooner or later someone will find a way to make money out of web only publishing, maybe even have done by now. But I havent seen it happen yet ( and that includes both acr and bike forums too) and I very much doubt that IPC would be ignoring it if it were possible.
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nowt to do with pop ups.... that's very much a technology that has had its day.... instead the raw content itself can be targeted....and articles tuned to users interests. Not even adverts, pop up or otherwise, and nothing that an ad blocker could stop....

If you hate software that is watching you, then stay away from the internet, as its being used a lot in many many places now.

BTW, forums of this nature are very crude compared to what can be done... this is no more than flat content, and is adding very little value in anyway at all above and beyond the browsing experience.

PS... it is that 'simple'.... it's a good part of what I do for living, so know the score!
 
photodog said:
Flipping through this months issue which just dropped through my letter slot this am... I found myself getting quiet annoyed at how posh the thing has become... HR on the cover, more HR's used for stuff on the inside... Yet another article by a journalist showing off his unfeasibly large posh boat....another cruise on a new Ancona 430..... More on a ovni... Another hr being reviewed in the new boats... And then the final insult, some posh student taking the family Sweden yacht on a Scottish cruise.

Is it just me or is the mag becoming increasingly out of tune to the average middle aged middle class used production boat owner??

What happened to the normal sailors?
Click to expand...

Are we reading the same magazine? I bought YM April 2013 at the airport last Wednesday and most articles are around 9 to 10 metres boats with relatively shallow draught. Useless for me since I have 2.20m draught. I would like to read viable and realistic cruising suggestions for boats with my draught and size (13m).
 
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