Re: Thinner!

["M. Lazarus" <mlazarus@xxxxxxxx>]

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