What’s it cost to create a Magazine?

[Todd Terry]

[Milton Hockman] “How does the COW make money off there mags?”

Like almost all publications, I’m sure the revenue comes from the sale of advertising…. not the cover price.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Ron Lindeboom]

The cost of the Creative COW Magazine is borne by the advertisers.

VERY FEW magazines today can get enough advertisers to cover their costs, etc., and we are fortunate that we get more advertisers than any of the other magazines that are left in our marketspace.

The magazine business is a rough business to get into. I would not recommend it for either the weak at heart, or for the fearless. We knew we were in an exceptional place that put us in a unique position, when we started the COW Magazine. Otherwise, we would not have attempted it.

Would we recommend it to anyone starting afresh? No, we would only recommend it to the independently wealthy, who are also foolhardy.

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom
CEO, CreativeCOW.net

Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
– Antoine de Saint Exupéry

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
– Gandhi

Better is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure than to rank with the poor spirits who neither enjoy much, nor suffer much because they live in a gray twilight that knows no victory or defeat. – Theodore Roosevelt

[Zane Barker]

[Ron Lindeboom] “The magazine business is a rough business to get into”

Especially with products like the iPad coming out.

I know that I plan to do my reading of the Creative Cow Magazine and other things from the iPad.

Hindsight is always 1080p

[Steve Wargo]

[Zane Barker] “I know that I plan to do my reading of the Creative Cow Magazine and other things from the iPad.”

I hope it’s waterproof in case you drop it into the toilet. Hey, that’s where I read.

Steve Wargo
Tempe, Arizona
It’s a dry heat!

Sony HDCAM F-900 & HDW-2000/1 deck
5 Final Cut (not quite PRO) systems
Sony HVR-M25 HDV deck
2-Sony EX-1 HD .

Ask me how to Market Yourself using Send Out Cards

[Zane Barker]

[Steve Wargo] “I hope it’s waterproof in case you drop it into the toilet. Hey, that’s where I read. “

No Problem

https://www.amazon.com/TrendyDigital-WaterGuard-Waterproof-Apple-Border/dp/B00373LR68/

Hindsight is always 1080p

[Steve Wargo]

Awesome. Now that’s what I’M talkin’ about.

Steve Wargo
Tempe, Arizona
It’s a dry heat!

Sony HDCAM F-900 & HDW-2000/1 deck
5 Final Cut (not quite PRO) systems
Sony HVR-M25 HDV deck
2-Sony EX-1 HD .

Ask me how to Market Yourself using Send Out Cards

[Mads Nybo jørgensen]

Hey Zane etc,

Interesting comments about publishing. I agree that you need an healthy bank balance to make it work on a higher level + that the print industry has been hit in recent years.

However, I am encouraged by this recent “Outside Shot” in Business Week: https://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2009/tc20091229_795528.htm?chan=magazine%20channel_business%20views which is suggesting that gadgets like the iPad will bring the consumer back to paid subscriptions + encourage the publisher to use video in their digital magazines – that can only be a win-win for us 🙂

All the Best
Mads
London, UK

Latest video to watch here:

Mac Million Ltd. – HD Production & Editing
Blog: https://macmillionltd.blogspot.com

[Todd Terry]

Well… my better half Kim is a graphic designer, and one of the things that she has done many times is publication design.

She’s worked on…gosh, I can’t even count how many… let’s just say numerous magazines over the last 15+ years or so.

Some of them, she was brought in to work on an established mag. Others, she designed from the ground up.

Every single one of them has folded. Every one.

(and not due to her design, I must be quick to add… which was great)

It’s certainly not a business I would want to jump into.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Tim Wilson]

[Mads Nybo Jørgensen] “…which is suggesting that gadgets like the iPad will bring the consumer back to paid subscription…”

This is the hope for the entire publishing industry, including books.

One thing that really struck me about the iPad is that books will be priced HIGHER than on Kindle – generally $14.95 compared to $9.95. That puts iPad books not far off what publishers are already netting for many bestsellers.

I can imagine people saying that Kindle and other e-readers (Sony, Barnes & Noble, etc.) are niche products, but you could have said the same about MP3 players before iPods. I had several of them before iPods were invented, and was actively using one of them up until I left it on a plane recently (oops)…but there was no way that any one of these was going to do ANYTHING to actually affect the music business. That only happened after Apple made the iPod and digital music part of the mainstream.

And it’s not only magazine and book publishers – it’s newspaper folks too. Once Apple has your credit card (and they already have something like 125 million of them on file), it’s one button to buy a newspaper or magazine. Costs for magazines so far are just below newsstand pricing, so there’s theoretically money to be made there.

That said, nobody’s actually making much money with these things via existing apps for iPhone and iTouch. I think they will, though.

Here’s the REAL issue, though. There are too many of magazines and newspapers in virtually every arena. In the new economy, people don’t have the money, and in the case of free magazines, the time, to read magazines that aren’t good enough to engage them. There are too many other ways to find compelling text…which, after all, is what most of the web still is.

Generally speaking, publishing failure is most often a message from the market that it doesn’t need or want your publication.

How did we get to this state? Largely through publishers who sought to capitalize on rising markets – and good for them! That’s when you SHOULD be making money. The problem is that publishers walk around with piles of dead trees, and try to find audiences to throw them at. But people don’t read dead trees! They read compelling stories. THAT part of the equation isn’t that hard.

The internet is not the solution. In fact, the SPEED of the internet can even more quickly expose a publisher’s weakness. Yes, the cost of entry is lower, but the side effect is that people usually start with less money, advertisers spend less, etc. But it’s not like online publishing has no costs! Publishing giants are even finding that creating compelling web *experiences* (ie, well designed sites) costs a fortune, but with the same crap online that nobody wants to read in print, they’re still not going to be able to create a compelling web *business.*

To put it another way, just because their stuff is easier for a global audience to read won’t make anybody want to read it. Quite the contrary – people find it even EASIER to stop reading you, because they have no investment in you. Better reading is a click away.

So even online, successful magazines are a lot harder than they look.

But to answer the question of how much it costs to create a magazine – the answer is, maybe hardly anything. If the goal is to make a magazine, to tell stories that people want to read, you can still create it by hand and print it on your computer or at Kinko’s. There are still plenty of great “mimeo and staple” magazines. You can probably stop by an indie record store for good examples, and see a variety of them on pretty much any college campus. DIY publishing can be alive and well.

If your goal is to make money with dead trees because that’s what you have on hand, well, it kind of doesn’t matter how little you spend. Making more than you spend is still going to be tough, unless people want to read your stuff.

Final observation: since Creative Cow Magazine started, 4 magazines in our industry have gone out of print, and their web presence hasn’t grown a whit. In some cases, publishers have even folded those websites!! The problem was never the print. The problem was their inability to find and keep an audience.

I don’t mean to say that we’re the only ones who know what we’re doing, or are the only ones who contributed to those other magazines/websites folding. All of us will only last until we don’t. Market forces apply to even the smartest people and the best magazines. I’m simply noting how these general observations about how audiences and markets apply to our industry, where the trends might be easier to see.

The bottom line is that there’s nothing wrong with the publishing industry. It’s perfectly sound IF people want to read your stuff. All these magazines and newspapers folding aren’t because of the internet business models or labor costs or printing or mailing. Those costs need addressing, but in the end, can be sustained, if people want to buy, or advertisers want to support, your publication. New platforms won’t change that.

tw

[Ron Lindeboom]

Yes, it is getting very tough, Todd, as you know from Kim’s work over the years.

I just got the latest issue of Videography the other day in the mail, and it was 36 pages. I remember when it was one of the truly powerful voices in our industry. But they are having a rough time as are all the magazine in this industry.

Since beginning Creative COW Magazine, which we launched at NAB 2006, we have watched Film & Video quietly go away. Then February of 2009, we watched Studio Monthly go under. Then April 2009 saw the quiet final unplugging of Video Systems. Then in October 2009, we heard from advertisers that Millimeter was letting advertisers know that in 2010 they were going all digital.

Going all-digital is fine, but you have to have a web-footprint to do that if it is going to be anything real. Unfortunately, magazines are way easier to make than it is to build a powerful and industry-leading web community, no matter the industry you are in.

We think that 2010 is going to be the last stand for many of the magazines out there that are barely hanging on. Thankfully, we have the website to draw upon and to leverage to build our magazine, many others do not have any such luxury.

Print is a rough business and publishers who could not fathom the web or how to use it, are likely going to have the same kind of issues when trying to learn to create new media emagazines going forward.

From where we stand, the real problem is not one of technology, it is one of hearing. Without a real community to draw on, many once powerful publishers flounder trying to figure out what the market wants.

That old guy, the erstwhile Saul of Tarsus, once said that people without a vision, perish. In our experience, he was right.

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom
CEO, CreativeCOW.net

Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
– Antoine de Saint Exupéry

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
– Gandhi

Better is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure than to rank with the poor spirits who neither enjoy much, nor suffer much because they live in a gray twilight that knows no victory or defeat. – Theodore Roosevelt