Upheaval in the French yachting magazines

S

Sybarite

Well-Known Member
Joined
7 Dec 2002
Messages
27,783
Location
France
Visit site
What was for many years France's leading magazine," Bateaux" closed during the summer and was put into liquidation. As has "Course au Large".

"Voiles et Voiliers" has reduced its staff from 29 to just 7 and has relocated to Rennes.

"Voile" seems to have emerged as the strongest of the three, acquiring the "Bateaux" title for just €25000.

"Loisirs Nautiques" disappeared about 10 years ago and would have been the closest equivalent of PBO.

All the magazines are reporting dropping subscriptions and advertising revenues and rising costs for paper copies.

What a pity. I thought that all of these magazines were very professionally produced.
 
As they were French and sailing related they very probably did it better than any British efforts; we know PBO & YM sales are in freefall due to unimaginative input and forums like this, stand by for charges here and a mass exodus & expansion of NTL !
 
The days of printed material are numbered, this is happening all over the planet. If you have an Internet web offering you need a lot less staff, but we have all become our own publishers. We are no longer reliant on a very, very small pool of people who write and get published. We can read and discuss with an author all sorts of content.

I understand Sybarite we both enjoy https://www.morganscloud.com/. Not only have I learnt a great deal from there, but have had the pleasure of being on one of the contributors boats, which lead to a very detailed discussion about the gear and the reasons why it had been chosen. While I am sure I could do that with a paper based publication it would be far more difficult.
 
Seajet said:
As they were French and sailing related they very probably did it better than any British efforts; we know PBO & YM sales are in freefall due to unimaginative input and forums like this, stand by for charges here and a mass exodus & expansion of NTL !
Click to expand...

The Sun Newspaper tried charging for online access for a while ..... but that didn't end well!

No-one will pay for content on the web, particularly when it's content created by the users, so I doubt whether Time would even consider it.

Richard
 
What I find surprising is the very little deference in cost between paper back and online Mag .
Personally I find all these boating magazine are well over price for what we get out of them .
Sorry Time , but the times are changing .
 
I am amazed that we still have sailing magazines at all

bloomin tough times for them I reckon.

Those scores of pages of classified adverts were what kept them going

For the past four years I have been writing a column for an American magazine

http://smallcraftadvisor.com/

They were paying me $100 a thousand words

I enjoyed writing it and also the feedback from other sailors. I had my email on the end of each item and I got some marvelously bizarre emails from ice-bound American sailors.

Now that Katie L is in the garden and I sail a massive yacht then I felt I should resign the column - at least until I get back to sailing Katie L up small creeks.

Dylan

PS.....

has anyone got an old yet servicable Centaur main lurking unloved in their shed?
 
sailaboutvic said:
What I find surprising is the very little deference in cost between paper back and online Mag .
Click to expand...

I mentioned this to Richard Shead a few years ago at SIBS.
I have a digital subscription to Cruising World - price is about 50% of the print price.

Richard said it was because Cruising World had a different buisiness model and left it at that.
Maybe a buisiness model IPC/Time should adopt.

sailaboutvic said:
Personally I find all these boating magazine are well over price for what we get out of them .
Sorry Time , but the times are changing .
Click to expand...

+1 On both counts.
 
SWMBO had a digital subscription to YM for a while, I think she was running out of cupboard space for the magazines and felt bad about binning them. But after her tablet suffered some sort of glitch we couldn't access them anymore, nor could. I read the same copy on my device. Went back to paper as it was exactly the same price.
 
One wonders if Richard Shead had read the runes, and seen the print market for the UK sailing and motorboat magazines also going down the pan.

In its current proliferate and highly segmented format, it does not really make commercial sense to divide the can of beans so many times. The result is a slew of magazines with decreasing editorial and mainstream content, becoming less and less attractive to purchasers.
 
Last edited:
8th Jan is the date, according to hisself :)


And I was referring to what he might have thought when he was driving his desk with such aplomb and coolness.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Share this page

Top