snowdeal.org - conflux

conflux

Wired About Those Fat Net Mags
"Lugging around a couple of magazines that cover the Internet and technology industries might qualify as a workout these days, with their bulked-up editorial staffs churning out a record number of pages to keep up with demand for advertising space.

The trend, which shows little sign of slowing despite a nascent dot-com shakeout, has at least some industry watchers wondering if these publications are growing a pace that may be setting them up for a big letdown -- just like some of the once high-flying companies they cover. "

""We believe it's not a good thing being a fat 400-to-500-page vehicle. We don't think readers want that," said Steve Thompson, senior vice president and group publisher of the Industry Standard."

redux [03.21.00]
Salon My dot-com business mags have fallen on me and I can't get up!
"It's no great mystery what's fueling the ungainly growth in these magazines. "There's a huge information overload going on right now," says venture capitalist Andrew Anker, a partner at August Capital. "It's being driven by marketers trying to spend dollars, not by users saying 'I need this content.'"

Web companies spent more than $700 million on magazine advertising alone last year. That's 348 percent more than they did in 1998, according to Competitive Media Reporting. Plus, with almost $25 billion flowing from venture capitalists into Net companies in 1999, 66 percent more than the previous year, there's a lot of business-to-business advertisers itching to reach the newly cash-rich dot-commies who need to quickly find somewhere to put all that capital to work."

""Are we too big? Of course, we're too big," says Jason Pontin, editor of the Red Herring, which is putting out a whopping 488 pages in April. "I recognize that we're getting uncomfortably large.""

bookmark: del.icio.us ::digg it ::furl ::reddit ::yahoo ::
9:49 AM 0 comments

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

[ rhetoric ]

“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”

[ outbound ]

conflux

0 Comments:

[ rhetoric ]

[ search ]

[ outbound ]

[ schwag ]

[ et cetera ]