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Because free Typepad is crap, and I can't alter the prior theme to accommodate large images, I had to retire the previous layout and use the only other layout available to free users. And because this layout can't be altered to host a background picture, the Wonder Woman drawing by Marcio Takara is gone.
Typepad was not my choice of blogging platforms. This blog was originally hosted by Vox which had hundreds of themes available for use by its members. But Six Apart mismanaged Vox before eventually shutting it down. (Not unlike how they mismanaged LiveJournal, and Movable Type). It offered members the option to transfer the blog to Typepad likely in the hopes of converting those Vox users into paying Typepad users once they became frustrated with how terrible free Typepad is. Yet, Typepad is not cost competitive with any other weblog host.
Ah, Hades. Here she is, anyway.
This deserves longer comment, but not for Marco’s sake, but for Daniel Jalkut. But the short of it is, Marco don’t know economics.
Digital distribution may eventually do away with the purchase and shipping of paper, the printing presses; it may do away with the costs of producing the books and sending them to the customer. It’s not, however, goint to cut the costs of having all of those writers who have to write, editors to edit, photographers to photograph and those ancillary costs like travel. lodgings, food, etc. And that’s just the costs incurred by the individual journalists -- who’d like to get paid for this as well as to be paid so he can eat, clothe him or herself and not have to live in a tent somewhere. And that doesn’t get into the overhead of the magazine itself (not related to moving paper around).
But then again, I pay for cable television. Yet those cable channels show me ads, too. I watch movies in theaters sometimes. There are commercials. Then there are trailers, which are more commercials. Then there’s the movie which may have product placement within it.
But Marco don’t know economics. Is he willing to pay $30 for a magazine app for a ad-free experience?
Note 1: It’s adorable how many commenters at Red Sweater have the mistaken assumption that the magazine reader is the main customer. Maybe they are all as naive as ✪ in believing that only Google sells to advertisers who reads/uses Google.
Note 2: Digital distribution doesn’t remove all overhead. It just changes some. Who gets to pay for the bandwidth to push out that app to you? Apple isn’t. This, despite the fact they pocket 30% for just providing the storefront.
Update 1: This is just sad.
Update 2: This gets more awesome!
This part has actually left me flummoxed. Marco went on this rant about the existence of advertising in a paid digital magazine without having a frame of reference whatsoever. Now, I did not know how much The New Yorker in print costs, (According to a quick internet search, it is $4.99, and they charge the same for the iPad app.) but I already knew that whatever it was, it’s not enough to cover the costs of producing the magazine. Thus, the print edition has advertisements.
He wrote the following...
Ignoring what content and apps “should” cost, and despite knowing that this is a very good magazine, this felt expensive.
...except he didn’t know how much the contend should cost at all. This was his frame of reference:
Most entire apps (including mine) cost $4.99 or less, once, and this magazine is $4.99 for just one issue.
“Most entire apps”... I’m going to take the example of Arment’s app Instapaper. It looks like a one-man operation, but I’ll assume a team of ten. He just makes Instapaper. There’s been 4 major versions in three years. I will not claim it is easy, or not a full time job. But maybe 10 people making an app with four major updates (though probably continuous minor updates) in 10 3 years.
(Ed: Dumb typographical error on my part.)
Now, I had a copy of Vanity Fair by my side. I was counting the people in the masthead, because I wanted to continue this in a fuller post later, but the tweet above irked me so. In fact, I did not finish counting the people in the masthead. When I stopped my count, I was at thirty people. I’ve only counted about one-fifth of the masthead of Vanity Fair. That means there’s likely a hundred people, and probably more working on Vanity Fair. In this copy of Vanity Fair, there was twenty-some-odd articles in this magazine. In this month’s issue. They’ll have to do this again for next month; produce twenty-some-odd articles. And again next month. And then again next month.
Now, I’m using Vanity Fair because I don’t have a copy of The New Yorker on hand, but I doubt The New Yorker is much smaller.
Now, let’s compare that again to Marco Arment’s one app, sold at $5 maybe to pay a team of one to ten people. Now, is that really comparable to what The New Yorker has to do every single month. And yet, they still sell it to you and me for $5. The only reason they can even get away with that lunatic pricing is because there are some advertisements to pay the freight of the cost of producing that magazine.
Update 3: I learn The New Yorker is a weekly, not a monthly. That probably alters the equation to be even less in favor of Marco Arment’s argument.
