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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnNephew" data-source="post: 159008" data-attributes="member: 2171">Well, to continue to argue the other side of it, ;-), I think they'd be putting out a very different magazine at $5 or $6.  For one thing, they probably'd have to cut the color everywhere but the cover.  For another, the way magazines charge so little is by making the bulk of their revenues on advertising.  How much advertising?  Well, I'd say probably about 50% of the space between the covers, plus the inside and back covers, maybe more.  So, supposing they made a 64-page magazine, you'd actually be getting about 32 pages of content, tops.  On a content-per-dollar basis, you'd probably come out behind.The bigger problem is that even attempting this model puts you in a chicken-and-egg conundrum -- if you don't have the advertisers to cover your production costs, you can't produce the magazine and sell it cheaply to get the big distribution; if you don't have the proven big distribution, you can't get the advertisers or get them to pay what you need.  (I have the impression that most of the alternative magazines in this industry have shut as a result of the vanishing of ad dollars -- the twin difficulties of getting ad buys in the first place, and then actually getting people to pay you.)  I would never build a business plan that depends on ad dollars from the game industry.So, yeah, I strongly commend the format and approach.  Not because I'm sure it works, but because it appears they looked at the problem of why all the other alternative RPG magazines have folded and horribly mutilated their creators'/investors' finances along the way.  They could have tried to do the same thing but somehow hope it will magically WORK for them when it didn't for plenty savvy business folks like White Wolf (their eponymous magazine) and AEG (Shadis), as well as countless others over the decades.  Instead, they questioned the basic assumption -- that a game magazine publishing business plan should be like other mass market magazine publishing -- and decided to start right off with a completely different approach, and see if that works instead.  I think a lot of the great successes of this business came by throwing conventional wisdom out the door.  (Some spectacular failures came that way, too, mind you...)Like I said, I pay $20 a quarter for my medievalist journal, and they don't even have multi-color printing on the *cover*.  Clearly they have "magazine" perception issues to face, and that's their biggest challenge.  As far as value goes, if people were comparing it to collected works in the D20 sourcebook arena rather than to Dragon and Dungeon, I think they'd fare a lot better.</blockquote>

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