Allen Holub on DDJ & C-Chest (long)

[Eric Green]

In message <75 at unet.pacbell.COM>, childers at unet.pacbell.COM (Richard Childers) says:
>In article <14047 at agate.BERKELEY.EDU> dean at violet.berkeley.edu (Dean Pentcheff) writes:
>
>>Let's face it: programmers (especially non-full-time ones) don't rate
>>squat with advertisers.
>			.
>>Unfortunately, I don't see much of a way around this problem.  Suggestions,
>>anyone?
>
>Well, the costs of printing and distributing could be cut sharply by making
>it entirely BBS-based and placing its contents in the public domain after,
>say, one month, at which point in time the material is considered dated and
>commercially useless.

Problem #1: Advertising. As I'm sure you know, the majority of the cost
of a magazine is paid by advertising. Thus, while it costs about the
same to create and ship a floppy-based magazine as it does a
paper-based magazine, advertisers don't appreciate not having their
glossies in there, and stay away in droves. That makes it hard to pay
authors, which makes it hard to gather worthwhile material (how many
people will, UNPAID, put out detailed, well-written articles? USENET
is perfect proof of the converse :-). This also makes it hard to sell
subscriptions for any reasonable price, which simply brings up point
#2,

DISTRIBUTION.

Even if we find some way of, say, digitizing the advertiser's
glossies, distribution is a problem. Disks are expensive, especially
if we have lots of digitized pictures = lots of disks. A BBS is no
answer, because it costs most people more to get info from a BBS than
it would from U.S. Mail & floppy disks (old aphorism: Never
underestimate the bandwidth of a pickup truck full of 9-track tape!).
Not to mention that these pictures would be LARGE.... even a 640x400
in 16 colors takes up some 128K. A number of these would make the
daily volume of USENET look trivial.

Thus, I doubt that it will be feasible anytime soon to create an
on-line or disk-based magazine with any success (note that copying is
no problem,  if it's advertiser-based -- advertisers love having their
advertisements spread as far and wide as possible). "soon" == any time
before the installation of high-speed digital communications serving
the majority of computer owners (i.e. ISDN & competitors).

--
Eric Lee Green    ..!{ames,decwrl,mit-eddie,osu-cis}!killer!elg
          Snail Mail P.O. Box 92191 Lafayette, LA 70509              
       MISFORTUNE, n. The kind of fortune that never misses.