The confessions & obsessions of journalist/entrepreneur Harry McCracken, founder of Technologizer.

Archive for the ‘PC World’ tag

PC World’s Tipping Point

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Just a quick note to point you towards Advertising Age’s chartfest on the state of the magazine industry. It shows that my friends at PC World have achieved something pretty spectacular: the highest percentage of revenues from online of any publication that reported this figure, at 38 percent.

Yes, that means that 62 percent of overall revenues still come from print–a medium where readers are still happy to pay real money for content, thank heavens. But if you know anything about consumer publishing, you can probably guesstimate what percentage of PCW’s ad revenues come from print versus online. And you’d guesstimate figures that show that PCWorld.com is a vibrant and growing revenue source.

(This is an important point in part because I still run into folks who assume that PCWorld.com is some sort of sideline or loss leader for a great big magazine–’taint so, and hasn’t been so for a long time.)

When I was at PC World, I explained to anyone who’d listen that our editorial strategy was pretty simple: We had to be a Web site that had a magazine, not a magazine that had a Web site. That philosophy affected the decisions we made in 10,000 different ways. And it’s nice to see revenue figures that validate that approach.

Posted by Harry McCracken

October 7th, 2008 at 5:31 pm

Posted in News

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