The Facebook campaign to save Business 2.0

Hi Stephen,
You're right that there are lots of interesting discussions happening as folks from all over the world try to save a magazine they love reading. Another discussion I found particularly interesting was asking members how much they would pay for the magazine and asking whether the current annual subscription price of $10 was too low. At a time where publishers are almost universally paranoid about their audiences getting content for free, and where magazines are often given away in hopes that circulation will rise and ad dollars will compensate - perhaps the real discussion should be whether publishing a magazine and counting on advertising to subsidize all costs is really the best business model. The pool of readers willing to pay $50 per year to get Business2.0 will likely be far smaller than their current audience ... but for advertisers and the magazine itself, that may not necessarily be a bad thing.

Maybe each issue comes with a postcard where you check which ads you actually looked at, and which ones had an impact on you.

I remember years ago, in some photo trades something similar was the norm - ads would be accompanied by text along the lines of "Circle No. 34 on your response card for more information."

And tucked away somewhere else in the magazine was a card with a grid of numbers to circle and send in. A few days/weeks later you'd get information packages from the manufacturers. Of course, this was all before we were concerned what mailing lists our names were on.

I recently canceled my newspaper subscription after 8 years of continual subscription. The reason were many but at the heart of it was they did not give me the news I wanted. They gave me what they wanted me to have and like it or not you paid for it. It reached the point where I could go through our local paper in less than 5 minutes.

Add to that the growing number and size of ads in these publications, you are less likely to get quality journalism and more ad copy.

The web has become the replacement. Using feedreaders, news groups, and other tools I can get what I want to enhanced my personal experience and less of what they determine to be worth my time.

Since I canceled on Thursday, they have called everyday and each day I tell them, "give me what I want to spend time reading and we will talk" otherwise- RSS and more my way.

It's not about the cost but the value for the cost and the return on investment for my time. Conventional publishers are out of touch with their audience or they are trying to reach to many regardless they are reaching out for salvation after years of the same old things while the cyber-universe has created tools that eclipsed the very reason they exist- delivery.

Now we each can create "Publication by ME" ads or not and know the content is exactly what we ordered. I have lost count the number of publications that went belly up with my cash in their pocket now there is little need to worry about it.

The solution for publishers INNOVATE or die. There is a reason why the horse and carriage are far and in between.