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  2. MIDRANGE-NONTECH
  3. February 2003

Re: Thinner!

Booth,

At 2/15/03 10:38 PM, you wrote: 
Please do the same comparison with a few other trade magazines from other
trades.  You may discover Penton has done quite well in a market that is
being scarred permanently.   Americans are ceasing to read.  Advertisers are
spending their scarce dollars in other places.  This is not an issue of
greed nor of malfeasance.

It's really hard to compare the IBM Midrange pubs w/ any other, since they (the other tech mags) have other factors (most notably real competition) to contend with. But a quick look at PC Magazine for the same time period is interesting and reinforces my point:

Cover price Feb. 1999: $50 / year
Cover price Feb. 2003: $40 / year

A 20% REDUCTION in price.

Number of pages Feb. 1999 (both issues): 548
Number of pages Feb. 2003 (both issues): 284

48% smaller.

iSeries News stats:

Cover price Feb. 1999: $129 / year
Cover price Feb. 2002: $149 / year

Not bad. A 16% difference, roughly keeping up w/ inflation.

Number of pages Feb. 1999: 168
Number of pages Feb. 2003: 72

Unless I miss my mark, that's about 57% smaller!! Unless you have
statistics to show that most of that was not "real" content, I think that
the total deliverable to the consumer has gone down *significantly*.

Both have news, online sites, product reviews, tech stuff, free e-newsletters, etc.

One item of note is that PC Magazine allows downloading their code and utilities w/o having a magazine subscription.

If your product is relatively expensive to start off with ($149 vs. $40), a perception of eroding value can be very detrimental.

-mark


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