will the last sailing journalist turn out the light

[Greenheart]

I think at our stage in life drinking Coke before a lecture is a bit risky in the windy-pants department.

I didn't know that one could take coke by imbibing. These students!! Whatever next?

 

[dylanwinter]

not at all

You say that like you feel that's a bad thing

not necessarily a bad thing

but the end result is that although the bloggers who make no money will be focussed on the audience and will be very specialist - like the guys who run the British Seagull outboard websites.

The professional journalists will need to deliver a lot of readers to make it worthwhile

the thirty thousand readers who pay for PBO at the moment are contributing around £150,000 a month towards the costs of writing, printiing and distributing the magazines

add the advertising income - not got a clue


PBO has at least six on the editorial staff - let us guess an editorial budget of £30,000.

let us guess that PBO occupies the time of each reader for say three hours

30,000 people three hours of web time - many of whom use ad blockers

total value.....

£1,000

so.... that will mean fewer specialist hacks - all professionals covering sailing matters will need to go for an audience of millions

and that will mean pitched the way ITV or sky deals with sailing - ie as an adrenalin sport involving big racing boats or cats racing and hopefully crashing into each other a lot

there will never be another Des, never another Denny.

there will be great bloggers - no more great yachting journalsits

enjoy them while you can chaps

of course there are all the great old back issues for us old men to enjoy

Dylan

 

[Phoenix of Hamble]

I met a chap the other day who used the moral argument as a reason as to why copyright should be enforced

and he was dead right

but technology makes copying things cost free and, here is the clincher, impossible to police

so all journalism - written, spoken and filmed will be free at the point of delivery.

Any that exists will either be done for the love of it - by bloggers

or paid for purely by the advertising

I just dont agree with the sentiment of this...

Linkedin have created a brilliant business by bringing together a community. They get a lot of income by providing tools to recruiting people within businesses to help them avoid agency fees.... So what i hear you ask... My point is that there are many ways to make money out of communities...

About 12 months ago i wrote www.threepointfix.co.uk for a bit of fun.... It has a couple of hundred registered users, mostly inactive, but a few who obviously value it... On there you can mark anchorages, moorings and marinas and add useful info for other boaters...You can also log passages and analyse your log book... I also wrote some code to allow GPS logs to be uploaded and viewed on Google Earth, as well as download saved waypoints to load to your plotter, but never quite finished it and made it live.... Now it'll never come to anything.

But.... Imagine for a moment that IPC had developed that... With the thousands of registered users, it could rapidly become THE source for cruising info, certainly for Northern Europe and probably globally... Then add the log book facility... A bit of info capture and you'd have gold dust... They could pay well for good additional content and target it very effectively... Revenue of course would come from advertisers, enthused by the ability to target their spend accurately... Imagine how much extra Beneteau woul pay to advertise a 40 foot boat to an audience they KNOW have a 32'er, sail 1000nm a year and always visit marinas...

And then add facilities to book local restaurants, organise taxis, reserve berths, find engine spares, get personalised weather forecasts etc etc... All of which fund good journalism, which attracts more users, which funds more good journalism, which.....

Its worth remembering that the audience who own boats are typically prime targets for attracting spend from so many brands... Why else would luxury car brands advertise in YM, or champagne companies sponsor yacht racing?

I'm just saying that the business model will change, and revenue will come from new sources.... But good content will always eventually be valuable and hence will be bought.

The only remaining factor will be whether its an IPC who will be smart enough to realise this, or a new entrant, less wedded to paper. Either way, whoever cracks it will make a lot more money from it than from printing ever smaller numbers of magazines.

 

[dylanwinter]

I sincerely hope you are correct

I just dont agree with this...

Linkedin have created a brilliant business by bringing together a community. They get a lot of income by providing tools to recruiting people within businesses to help them avoid agency fees.... So what i hear you ask... My point is that there are many ways to make money out of communities...

About 12 months ago i wrote www.threepointfix.co.uk for a bit of fun.... It has a couple of hundred registered users, mostly inactive, but a few who obviously value it... On there you can mark anchorages, moorings and marinas and add useful info for other boaters...You can also log passages and analyse your log book... I also wrote some code to allow GPS logs to be uploaded and viewed on Google Earth, as well as download saved waypoints to load to your plotter, but never quite finished it and made it live.... Now it'll never come to anything.

But.... Imagine for a moment that IPC had developed that... With the thousands of registered users, it could rapidly become THE source for cruising info, certainly for Northern Europe and probably globally... Then add the log book facility... A bit of info capture and you'd have gold dust... They could pay well for good additional content and target it very effectively... Revenue of course would come from advertisers, enthused by the ability to target their spend accurately... Imagine how much extra Beneteau woul pay to advertise a 40 foot boat to an audience they KNOW have a 32'er, sail 1000nm a year and always visit marinas...

And then add facilities to book local restaurants, organise taxis, reserve berths, find engine spares, get personalised weather forecasts etc etc... All of which fund good journalism, which attracts more users, which funds more good journalism, which.....

Its worth remembering that the audience who own boats are typically prime targets for attracting spend from so many brands... Why else would luxury car brands advertise in YM, or champagne companies sponsor yacht racing?

I'm just saying that the business model will change, and revenue will come from new sources.... But good content will always eventually be valuable and hence will be bought.

The only remaining factor will be whether its an IPC who will be smart enough to realise this, or a new entrant, less wedded to paper. Either way, whoever cracks it will make a lot more money from it than from printing ever smaller numbers of magazines.

I really hope you are correct

but the web already delivers some of the the revenue streams you mention

would I really go to a sailing website to find a taxi because Des Slieghtholme wrote for it?

the car advertisiers can get millions of on-line eyes at knock down prices by attaching their name to an ocean race or a video of a bloke falling off a stool

they will get sailors eyes attracted to to a well researched and well written article

but how much will they pay for those 30,000 eyes

They would have to be prepared to pay £5 a thousand to allow the hack who wrote it to earn £150

I dearly hope you are correct

but I just cannot make the maths add up

Dylan

 

[Phoenix of Hamble]

Well, you pay between 5 and 10 times as much to advertise in a targetted manner than scattergun...

You're right about the random taxi booking... But... If i've just created a passage plan on the site and downloaded the waypoints for my GPS, and perhaps booked a table at a restaurant for the planned Friday night visit, then i might also sort a taxi while i'm at it.... Who knows, but i suspect that's where it'll head (eventually)

The reason the millions of views are good is because amongst them are a few thousand who will be interested... Find me 30,000 views with a few thousand interested is probably more attractive as i can focus my message more tightly

 

[Phoenix of Hamble]

One more example... Write a good article on servicing a particular marine engine, and only show it to people who have a boat with that engine, who have stopped logging passages for 3 weeks, and during late september... At the bottom, offer a complete service kit at an attractive price... More revenue... More good journalism funded.

Its not hard to come up with lots of ways of bringing revenue in, but requires people to break their thinking away from traditional flat advertising techniques.

 

[bljones]

By and large, I think magazines eff it up when they try to go digital, because they try to provide a digital magazine. They cannibalize their subscription and newsstand sales which decimates the advertising base, and thins out the mag which further hacks at the readership while they fumble along trying to figure out how to generate income from free content until the thing becomes irrelevant and goes poof.

There are only two magazines that I subscribe to: Good Old Boat and Small Craft Advisor.
Why?

Because I freakin' have to!!

They have a web presence as an adjunct to their paper presence, offering value added info rather than regurgitation of what is in print. Very clever, actually- the website acts as a teaser for the mag, and the mag acts as a teaser for the site, driving subscribers and browsers and ad dollars in both directions.

A brilliant combination that seems to work well.

We are seeing publishing undergoing a seismic shift right now- publishing houses are becoming less and less relevant with the explosive growth of e-readers and e-publishing, and the publishing business, for better or worse is becoming less elitist and more accessible. Anyone can publish a book today for pennies...
...and it shows. There is some truly horrible stuff out there.

I think we will see some major changes in magazine distribution over the next 5 years as mags and newspapers and the publishing houses get a handle on e-readers and the possibilities.




I have a mildly successful boat blog, that thous, er, hund, er, nearly dozens seem to enjoy. It's filled with lots of good information, some average story telling and some truly exceptional lying...

Like thousands of other blogs out there, some better, many, many, worse, all free.

 

[Koeketiene]

not necessarily a bad thing

but the end result is that although the bloggers who make no money will be focussed on the audience and will be very specialist - like the guys who run the British Seagull outboard websites.

The professional journalists will need to deliver a lot of readers to make it worthwhile

Speaking purely for myself - I much prefer the audience focussed specialist to the professional journalist writing for a wider audince.

For one, he's more likely to be independent and will say what he means. And secondly, he will actually know what he's talking about.

In order to cater for his wider audience, the professional journalist will have to dumb down the article. And he will most likely have to cover a wider field of subjects, and therefore be less knowledgeable.

That's why people outgrow yachting magazines - after a couple of years you will find that they have nothing new to tell you.
This leaves mags forever chasing new readers. In these times of economic austerity - with very few new people entering the sport - it's a losing battle.

IMO, yachting mags need to stop chasing new readers and trying to be all things to all men. At times like these they need to cater for their core audience. No more glitzy, empty content-light features.
Be bold - be honest - and above all: be interesting!

 

[Lakesailor]

That's why people outgrow yachting magazines - after a couple of years you will find that they have nothing new to tell you.
This leaves mags forever chasing new readers.

Any special interest mag is the same.
Photo mags have been churning out the same pap for years

Bluebells for March colour
Holiday pics with a zizz
Fireworks without stress
Snow pics that work

Etc. etc. Every year.

 

[Elemental]

Magazine publishers just don't understand digital publishing. If they 'go digital' they likely just try and take the paper format and make it available via a website. Or in the IPC case, produce a wensite that contains very little useful information to try and 'persuade' you to buy the paper magazine.

I disagree that people expect to get all their content for free. The music industry lost out badly because all they tried to do was stop filesharing/copying from happening at all. But websites like the now defunct allofmp3.com proved that users were prepared to pay for legal music (putting aside the question of whether allofmp3.com was actually legal - users believed it was). From that you have 'all you can eat' streaming services like Spotify, Pandora etc and 'pay per play' services like Psonar. Consumers are prepared to pay for good quality content - just not always on the terms that trad. publishers want. Why not allow me to pay-per-article, rather than shell out for a whole magazine just to read the one article that interests me? Micro payment technologies now enable cost effective charging for small amounts. Publishers just have to get used to the idea that they can no longer rely on a year's worth of subs from each reader.
Phoenix make goood points about targetted advertising. I use gmail nowadays as my mail service and I regularly click on ads that are generated via wordscanning my email. They're relevant to me, and I love a good dose of retail therapy Boating sites could do exactly the same. If I pay a small amount to read an article, show me ads. that relate to that. I probably won't use an ad. blocker if the ads are meaningful to me.