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Comment by itmag | Hacker News Reader

"Pfft, who pays for information you could find free on the Internet."

I'm in exactly that boat, as I run a magazine as well and have been thinking those thoughts. I even use the same print on demand company as HNM (Magcloud).

Seeing this I'm much more interested in trying to make some money. Any ideas are much welcome! :)

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Twenty-one issues later, the magazine has about 4,700 subscribers worldwide, Lim said. Annual subscriptions cost $88 for the print edition or $29 for the digital .mobi/.epub/.pdf bundle. Only five percent of subscribers get the print version, he said, but that’s still a tidy sum of about $20,000 on top of an estimated $130,000 in subscriptions per year. He also sells full-page ads.

Holy fuck! I'm beginning to see that I have some SERIOUS limiting beliefs about the possibility of making money like this. I've never made a single dollar because I didn't even think it was worth trying. Serious inspiration value here!

If I had that kind of money coming in I could release an issue every month, easy peasy (getting the content has never been the bottleneck for me, rather it's the graphic design side of things (I use a volunteer who works for free in her spare time)).

Anyone who has any input on how to monetize my magazine, please contact me now!

Charge money for it.

Charge money for advertising in it.

How about this:

Keep the PDFs free to download.

Have a Member's Support Brigade (stolen concept from thesurvivalpodcast.com) which includes free e-books from other people and coupons for other people's products.

Charge for print copies.

Sell a subsciption which gives you a special Ipad version or whatever.

Put in ads.

Sell a "best of" volume via Lulu.com.

Make our own spin-off e-books and sell.

Merchandise (t-shirts, stickers, etc).

Amazon store (books we recommend, stuff like that).

Use kickstarter.com to raise money for specific sub-projects (like "start a hackerspace").

Any more ideas?

You're overcomplicating things. Pick the simplest idea to implement and then test it by offering it to the market. See if it works, go from there. And just do one thing to start with.

I'd add that everyone knows about paying for a subscription to a magazine and everyone knows about paying for advertising so you won't have to teach people about the value (or not) of those two things.

Alternatively just copy the Hacker Monthly business model, apply it to your content. It seems to work and it would be easy to copy.

1. Make it an iMagazine using iBooks Author

2. Give it for free on the AppStore

3. Monetize using full page ads

Why free? the whole idea is to have eyeballs so you can charge for premium ads.

Or you can charge from 0.99 to 4.99 depending on how selective or captive the content is, like finance, law, etc.

There is a ripe market for disruption nobody has tamed yet, everybody can design and publish their own magazine with little effort and there are millions of possible categories from fashion to tech, nature, biking, sailing, etc.

The newsstand icon in my iPad is always empty but that's about to change.

Right there, as more and more iMagazines pop up, the need to design full-page ads increases, creating a new market on its own, giving birth to a new ad network.

There is plenty of money to be made, all we need is imagination and dedication.

Right. And maybe a startup is needed in the iMagazine advertisement niche? Matching up magazines and advertisers, doing analytics, running campaigns, that sort of thing.

This actually sounds quite interesting to me...

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