Yes, it does cost more to offer print than digital periodicals- I never said it didn't, and even pointed it out in other posts, because it cuts both ways.
According to everyone who has a reason to know, the magazines were running in the black and showing an (admittedly) slight overall increasing trend in circulation.
People talk about "only 50k subscribers out of 5m players," but I don't see how merely changing the format will perforce result in a net increase. Those 4,950,000 other players weren't buying the magazines for a variety of reasons: they couldn't get it where they lived (for whatever reason); they borrowed someone else's copy to read; the content didn't interest them. Etc.
They killed a successful product in favor of an as yet untested product, and by doing so, WotC is gambling that the majority of those 4,950,000 had no access, and not that they were people who would never buy the magazine regardless of media format because they didn't like the magazines at all or were borrowers instead of buyers.
And by doing so, they've alienated a certain (as yet unknown) portion of their established subscriber/purchaser base.
50K birds in the hand are worth a lot more than an uncertain number of birds in the electronic bush.
They could have continued publishing the successful products, generating positive cash flow. As you correctly point out, e-media are cheap, and the costs of translating the data to the website would be virtually nil- it probably already exists in digital form if they use anything resembling a modern computer/WP layout and editing system. Thus, the additional costs of running a coexisting digital version of the magazines would be minimal. Then they would be able to track their numbers, seeing which product was doing best for them. Then they could decide whether the business is best off by producing print only, digital only, or a mix of both products.
There are economic formulae for this that companies use all the time when they produce a variety of goods, like parts and finished goods. They make a certain amount of money doing each, and have to decide what is the optimal amount of production that should go to each category of goods. Sometimes, the parts can be mass produced for a low price, but have a low profit margin, while the finished goods require additional costs to manufacture, but high profit margins. Sometimes, the finished goods have even lower profit margins than the parts, but they have the dominant market share for products in the category.
Any MBA- heck, anyone who knows a little stats-level math- can do that analysis. Its cheap, but time consuming.
But WotC, despite having MBAs on staff, didn't take the time to do this basic business analysis. I know this because (as has been pointed out) the digital product does not yet exist, and apparently will not at any time co-exist with the print product.
Of course, the analysis can be attempted after the fact, but the data won't be of the same quality- the contemporaneous numbers simply won't exist. And by the time the analysis might reveal that a mixed production would have been better than digital only, it could be too late to woo back the people who left in anger.
