Ask YC: A Magazine That Publishes Blogs. Startup Potential?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=225858

by dkokelley • 18 years ago

17 28 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I had this idea about 10 minutes ago on my way to the mailbox. Since I believe that ideas aren't worth anything on their own, I submit it here to see what you guys think about its potential. Here's the idea:

A magazine that finds interesting blogs, bundles them together (maybe with themes), and publishes them in a print magazine.

My thoughts on this>

People could be exposed to new/interesting blogs that they might not find on their own. They can also read up on their favorite blogs in places that they normally wouldn't be able to (anywhere they don't want to pull their laptop out).

There are some pros for blog publishers too: For new and undiscovered writers they can have their blogs featured. More established writers could opt to publish with a revenue sharing model.

Of course there are also the articles about Adsense optimization, etc.

Another variation of this idea would be a system for bloggers to have their blogs bundled up and printed in a magazine to give as a gift to their readers, similar to amateur musicians making a family and friends CD.

Anyways, what do you guys think? Is something like this even feasible? Any gaping holes that I haven't even realized yet? (And remember, I just thought of this a few minutes ago.)

alaskamiller2• 18 years ago

Sounds like an old idea of a zine. Two problems to tackle:

First, logistics of the physical stuff, thankfully http://magcloud.com/ was recently launched so barrier to entry is considerably lower.

Second, getting the permissions from bloggers to syndicate their content. There's plenty of issues here. Foremost being that most blog content are... well... blog content. They're pithy, short, fluffy, sugary, whatever. If you find higher quality material then you have to pay for it. The established bloggers might not be interested in sharing control of their content.

dangoldin• 18 years ago

A couple of things that came to my mind when I read this:

1. You will need to get permission from every blog author you want to include in the magazine

2. How will you go about finding blogs to include?

3. People that are interested in reading blogs are pretty handy with Google and would be able to find relevant posts themselves.

4. A lot of blogs are very similar to one another and I noticed that any given day you will have a few blogs writing about the same exact thing. A monthly, or even weekly, magazine may not be frequent enough to capture everything of interest to the average blog reader.

An idea you may want to consider is just having "channels" of blogs and then having people sign up for the various "channels" they are interested in, providing them with a daily feed of posts. You can also try including this feed into the Kindle, maybe something can come of that.

Alex3917• 18 years ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=59248

jakewolf• 18 years ago

Don't worry about the tiny percentage of people who read every blog in the world. For most of the population, paper still works. A good editor could pull a great weekly off.

mileszs• 18 years ago

I think you'd have to pick a 'market', really. If you were targeting politics, you might be able to make it work. In the tech market, I can't imagine people opting for the over-priced dead-tree version over our computers, keyboards glued to our hands and all.

Do note, however, that I'm a tad bitter when it comes to magazines. I would actually enjoy browsing them if they were not so expensive and the information not so out-dated (and AdBlock were available as a plugin).

alaskamiller2• 18 years ago

Yeah, I wish I could get all my information free. Why can't content publishers understand this?

gojomo• 18 years ago

Make it a free daily in big cities, so the content is only 24-72 hours older than when it was blogged, and it might work.

rms2• 18 years ago

I doubt it, but it's a cool enough idea that I'd like to see someone try.

mechanical_fish• 18 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Now

Based on this sample of one, your doubts are justified: These guys went out of business in a bit less than 1 year.

Of course, there's a lot of ways to run a paper or magazine, so maybe a different approach would have worked better. I never found Boston NOW especially interesting... it was mostly wire-service filler with a sprinkling of no-name bloggers.

PStamatiou• 18 years ago

As an active blogger myself one issue I see, aside from getting bloggers to agree to this and finding a price they would accept (very few bloggers will do it for free, unless this publication becomes popular), is the fact that many blog posts simply aren't of publishable quality. If someone told me they wanted to pick a random article of mine and publish it, I would definitely want to edit it first. Web content doesn't entirely work well as print unless tweaked.

The other issue is.. will people used to reading blogs actually read print material of the same type of content? The nature of some of the content might make it outdated and so on

bluehatrider• 18 years ago

This is not a good idea.

Newspapers and magazines are in trouble.

Ad revenues to newspapers nationwide are down double digits this year. The top 100 advertisers have shifted over $ 1 Billion in ad dollars to the web from print and tv.

Going from what is growing to what is dying doesn't make any sense dkokelley.

tonystubblebine• 18 years ago

Awhile back Joel Spolsky compiled Best Software Writing I, a collection of online tech writings from other people. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BestSoftwareWriting.h...

It seems similar to the format you're imagining and was definitely successful from a quality standpoint. The people who read it, enjoyed reading it.

That's different than saying it was a huge commercial success or that there's so much good writing that you could fill a themed magazine each month.

volodia• 18 years ago

Why don't you publish your magazine online? There's alltop.com that does something like this already, but I can see ways to make it better.

dkokelley3• 18 years ago

Publishing the magazine of blogs online defeats the purpose somewhat. :)

utnick• 18 years ago

sounds like a decent idea. make a few niche magazines and then put them in vending machines at airports. i would probably buy

chriskelley• 18 years ago

Niche markets are definitely the way to go. I'm in the VFX world, and there is a DVD "Mag" (same idea, different format) that basically collates the best spots from the last couple months and sends the DVD out to subscribers. The spots are nothing subscribers haven't already seen, but it's always great to see things in their full beauty on screen, as well as having the tangible product to put on the shelf.

There is something to be said for the beauty of the printed word - I say go for it. Good luck!

dkokelley3• 18 years ago

Thanks for the input so far, guys. I do want to ad that if I were to try something like this I would probably not publish much tech content. Tech savvy readers already get the blogs they want.

I'm thinking more along the lines of businesspeople - "Blogs for the rest of us" you could say. Is there a potential demand for blogs off of the internet?

Mystalic• 18 years ago

Actually, despite its, uh, antiquity, I like this idea. Let me explain.

1) Why does everyone think that they'll have trouble from blogs for republishing? It's huge extra exposure - I feel that you'll get tons of people interested.

2) Go away from publishing blog posts to stories about the bloggers (egos), about how they started their idea, features on getting started, new stories by bloggers, etc. The TOPIC is blogging, not the posts that they've written. Remember that and you have your focus.

3) It's simply not a topic covered by any major magazine

The bad -

1) Magazines are indeed dying. Ad revenues are down and continue to drop.

2) It's ironic to cover such a new media with such an old one and the irony will hit people as they read it.

3) You're going to need a good deal of money to start this up and do circulation.

dkokelley3• 18 years ago

Very good points. Yes it does seem to be pretty expensive to print up the physical magazines.

I'm liking the idea of getting it in an area where the readers may not have access to the internet (specifically plane rides). If I know I'm going to be on the plane for 4 hours and I can't use my laptop for the internet, what better way to calm the panic than by having a magazine full of 10-15 or so blogs that I can read?

Jax• 18 years ago

Agree with u. As a geek, I would opt to read geeky stuff on magazines when i dont have access to internet. Here are a few things I suggest you consider. 1.) You can start with the air passengers. And the best thing to do would be to setup a small stall in the airport or very near to the gate. 2.) Sell in small number of pages. And sell different volumes per topic. Becoz a geek would like tech content and a granny would health related content(i didnt ask my granny). Like one Maybe around 15 pages per-topic per-week, since u only want to offer them content to be occupie during journey. 3.) when there's blog content about latest stuff, ur content might be old for readers at the end of the month. So publish new editions every week. 4.) if u are going to publish different a volume per topic, then the easiest way of getting content would be Technorati or any other blog aggregator. 5.) remember: start small. U can ofcourse start with around 3 topics for different age groups. Like 'gadgets' for kids, 'talk of the town' kind of content for women and biz for men. 6.) u can also just start by using a laser printer at home to print(i dont know about printing, checkout which is economical. 7.) start as a niche magazine for travellers. u can later expand by setting up stalls at more public travel stations and other places. 8.) u might get busy with aggregating content. So i suggest u hire someone to look after the stall. U can find students looking for partime jobs(getting them might be easy, who doesnt want to read magazines free?)

i hope u liked the above. And please apologize for using mobile lingo, i am on my mobile phone :)

Tichy• 18 years ago

I think it exists, but I can't remember the name. Shelf-something? It was on HN several times (or their blog was).

Personally I don't care for the idea. A good accumulator of interesting content is OK, but I don't like physical magazines (they tend to clutter my home and I hardly ever read them anyway). Make it readable on mobile phones, that would be sufficient for me.

sonink• 18 years ago

You might not believe it, but I had the exact same idea sometime back. I think its brilliant(obviously ;)) - allow me to share some of the things I thought about.

1. I think the risk to bloggers not being fine with is overblown. Everybody loves free publicity - and if some of them are not keen, then just drop them. The internet is big enough to find enough interesting content.

2. You can do it in a subscription model. People come to your site and upload their details - preferences etc. You promise them FREE magazines through mail covering their topics periodically. They have nothing to loose. Once you have enough people covered you can get paid for highly targeted ads.

3. Offline model might work well on an on-demand basis. You might want to tie up with local printing shops and send them the formatted material on-demand and always updated. They sense local demand and print based on that. Kind of like a franchisee model.

4. The things to highlight are highly targeted content - ( I have never seen an old school magazine which has more than 15% relevant content to me) and almost up-to-date - (I rarely see a news item in an old school mag which I havent read about online)

greyman• 18 years ago

Your idea is interesting and might work. One Slovakian daily does something similar - they have blogs written by their readers (anyone can register one), and if they find some blog post interesting, they republish it in print (but they have an agreement with blog writers that they can do that - as a counter-service for free hosting).

The potential problems of your idea to think about:

1) Many blog posts are written in a conversational style, and their purpose is to collect relevant links, comment on something, or spark a discussion. Basically, many blogs can be characterized as conversation platforms - reprinting them to paper will lose this dimension.

2) For reprinting you would need to pick up essay-like blog posts, which have their own merit without reader comments or inbound links. And those are not easy to find, so you can encounter similar issue like "normal" magazines - how to find good content.

3) When we are really talking about magazine (not newspaper), the important parts are also design and photos. You will really need (to pay for) professional photos to make the magazine engaging.

4) distribution - another big pain in the... how will you distribute?

To sum it up, if I would like to make money from blogs, I would rather go to a path of either:

1) republishing the blogs online (might have sense if you add value by grouping interesting stuff together)

2) trying to run blog network myself and share revenue with authors

3) start a blog myself and pay writers per post (or per visitor numbers).

DanielBMarkham• 18 years ago

I like this.

Like everything else, though, the trick is finding the sweet spot in the market where you can make a buck and provide value to other people.

Who is it worth money to, in order to read your mag? Is it people who are offline -- the internet illiterate? Seems like it would be people looking for good content and not using one of the aggregation engines/sites out there. I'm just guessing, but perhaps that is a pretty tight niche. Something like older people interested in penguin farming but who don't own a computer.

If you can identify/find this niche, then I think you're halfway there. But the idea is only "cool" because in the back of my mind I think there IS such a niche. Beats me what it is, though.

Be aware that your niche may not be readers. It could be magazine providers. For instance, doctor's offices provide magazines for people to read while they wait. There might be a nice niche in there where you could provide content based on the doctor's type of practice and clientele. I'm sure you could identify, for instance, 40,000 foot doctors in the United States. Maybe 20% of them (I know, Chinese Math, but this is back-of-napkin-stuff) would be interested in providing internet "recap" material for those waiting in their office. Eight thousand docs at $40 a year, and you've got a nice niche business for yourself and maybe a couple other people.

sanj• 18 years ago

I'd like a variant of this:

blog => [annotated, photo] book

Many of my friends are popping out kids lately. They have beautiful pictures and witty comments. I'd like that bound and organized into a book.

colortone• 18 years ago

some one has already done this, can't find it right now...

the key is to have the magazine be custom made by the subscriber

i.e. outsource the editorial to the user

gmayerson• 18 years ago

You mean like a magazine of blog essays like the Journal of Bloglandia, ISSN 1940-7645? http://wapshottpress.com/j-bloglandia/

Issue 1 is on sale at Amazon and Lulu. We're looking for essays for Issue 2. If any of you would like to send me an essay formatted correctly on the template, I'm sure I'd love to print it.

Ginger Mayerson

Editor, J Bloglandia

Ask YC: A Magazine That Publishes Blogs. Startup Potential?

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