Shuttered Magazines and Their Running Web Sites

Yesterday it was looking at newspapers, and today an interesting piece in Folio about magazines closed by publishers that decided to leave the web sites up. As was true with the newspapers, the data is from Nielsen. This time we don't have the average time spent. The data below compares the date the magazine was shuttered (2007, unless otherwise stated) to the number of unique visitors for August 2007 (unless otherwise stated):

Site	Mag Gone	Visitors
NickJr.	February	3,260,000
Child.com	March	534,000
Cracked.com	February	365,000
ElleGirl.com	April 2006	358,000
InfoWorld	April	559,000
StuffMagazine.com	October	223,000 (July)

Without the time being spent, it's hard to determine whether people are seriously using these sites or just breezing through - the former meaning a better chance for the necessary advertising dollars. But it's interesting how many people some of these sites are bringing in even after the magazine itself closed. What would be really interesting to know is wht their revenues and profitability were compared to the print days. My guess would be that revenues are significantly down, but that profitability may not be - after all, why close the magazine and keep the web site open if you were a publisher and didn't think the site was adding to your bottom line?

The difficulty for writers is that the publishers have set an expectation of lower pay on the web, as they constantly complained about having to invest all this money into it. Well, of course they did, just as tradtiaional big consumer magazines can lose tens of millions - otherwise known as investment by the publishers - until finally turning a profit. Only, writers are getting suckered into underwriting what the publishers are doing. That can't last; if it does, we're all going to be out of the editorial business. Now is the time to push for treating the web and print as equals. Wait, and you'll contribute to the industry "standard" of paying web writers - a.k.a., you, in the future if not now - less than print writers.