I Sold The Magazine, Too
marco.org
marco.org
Shows how much baggage traditional media carries from the past and how convoluted a news organization can get once you start adding sales, advertising, and other departments that can be avoided now with the proper strategy.
Marco Arment has a sizable niche following which provided an initial boost when The Magazine launched. His personal connections have allowed him to snag a handful of known names within that same niche circle.
But more importantly, I think there's a different level of burden on a niche, under-the-radar type publication like this as compared to much of traditional media. I don't think Marco has a research staff to vet every article, so it's possible that they have or will eventually publish false information thanks to a lack of due diligence. Will anyone care? I guess it depends what falsehood they publish.
What if the falsehood results in a libel claim? Now you're talking about significant legal involvement (and costs).
Or maybe they end up running a story that has been plagiarized. What happens then?
I think that what Marco has done with the Magazine has been great, but I often find that when you start dissecting "broken industries", you can start to see a method to the madness that led to the current state of affairs, and I question if big media is no different.
Simplified money transfers were (still are?) a booming concept when PayPal launched, providing a simple alternative to the major banking networks that were slow and full of red tape. But as time has gone by, most of these payment services have gotten equally complex (holds on money, automatic reversals, etc...) because they slowly discovered that there was a reason for all the red tape. I find myself wondering if The Magazine's business model will discover a similar situation.
I think it was a pretty brilliant idea to have a lot of the pieces be written by popular bloggers and people with lots of twitter followers. Then they organically advertise The Magazine "for free", right when it needs the biggest pop.
(And yes, they were mainly his friends, but I bet offering people a few grand for a longer blog post, cold, would work pretty well.)
That said, I can't really think of a plausible example of something The Magazine could hastily publish that could land them into legal trouble. I suppose a story full of falsehoods could tarnish its reputation, but I'm not sure it has a reputation to tarnish in the firs place.
Liability insurance (http://www.authorsguild.org/services/media-liability-insuran... for example) would help to mitigate this risk. I can't find premium cost info for a writer's policy, but our premiums for engineering general liability and E&O are a few thousand dollars. I don't imagine a writer's policy could be significantly more than that (our policies cover injury and death).
At the very least, any publications that follow in The Magazine's footsteps stand a far better chance of success than the current lot of broken-by-design Newsstand apps. Every time I see a magazine app whose thumbnail is the cover from their print edition which is too small to even read it's obvious they haven't thought much about what it means to make a publication for a smartphone. "Exporting to app" from InDesign just isn't going to cut it. Marco's app is among the first that seems to have actually taken design of a mobile publication seriously.
OTOH, this is basically the business model of most niche paper magazines. You essentially have one editor, a bunch of freelance writers given assignments, and then photos are either freelance or stock. I guess they also have an ad sales department, unless that it outsourced too. But shoe-string permanent staffs are very common.
Marco did something interesting: stick to one platform, play by Apple rules and see what you can build with that scheme. Id say that him being a developer was a huge advantage. Finding a developer for a small project these days is costly. But starting from zero he avoided the trap a lot of magazines fall into, like trying to create a enriched PDF that use the design guidelines we use on paper (multicolumn, etc..).
I read somewhere that his contributors get paid the standard going rate in most big magazines (Time, New Yorker,...) Not a lot of small magazines can say the same. The Magazine did not have ads, so he didn't need to manage/outsource that part of the business.
By no means is this the only way of doing things, of course, and it might not work for everybody but I found it inspiring. It was (is) a tight, lean and simple product.
That is primarily due to his large influential niche audience and friends in the tech media. Joe Schmoe could do the same thing, better, but without that free media exposure it would go nowhere, lost in the open sea that is the App Store.
"without doing much of the kind of work I actually enjoy."
Under him The Magazine as a product probably would stagnate like Instapaper did. Then he would have sold it anyway.
And, advisory role usually means a decent chunk of shares too. With what Glenn have in mind, this might be a smart financial step.
Given the success of instapaper and the fact he'll have done fine out of Tumblr, I suspect Marco has no need for that and would rather devote his time and attention (something can be distracting even while taking little actual time) to something he'd be happier doing.
The details of the sale aren't public either, and he's now an "adviser" to The Magazine. He may still have some equity in the company. One could also analyze the profits from a sale compared to estimated profits down the line, and feel that they would rather cash out now, to pursue other interests. A lot of "savvy" business-people and businesses divest themselves from businesses that they feel have outgrown them or are not a part of their core business model.
He recently bought a BMW (a long running joke), and estimates guess he made about $6.2 million from the Tumblr sale. If he puts the BMW up for sale, then worry.
(I see a _very_ small need…)
Just a bit from ATP #14: "I'm terrified of doing anything that would make me look like a jerk in front of my family and friends"
That just doesn't seem true. He consistently goes out of his way to engage in trivial arguments with people, especially on Twitter. Literally days after the sale, he called out Anil Dash in a needlessly confrontational way about some minute error in his history of Tumblr (http://dashes.com/anil/2013/05/seven-years-ago-my-wife.html). Not to mention the time when got in some squabble with a writer for one of the Apple rumor sites, then blacklisted said site from every Instapaper account.
As far as I'm concerned, he's made a jerk of himself in public innumerable times already. He just seems like an abrasive guy. That's not to say that his work is inferior (certainly assholes have created incredible work before), but any fear of looking like a jerk is moot. He has been a jerk forever.
One thing is to write angry tweets, and in a very different level, would have been shutting it (or Instapaper) down just because he's burned out. He cares about his users.
Tumblr, co-founder, acquired by Yahoo. Instapaper, founder, acquired by Betaworks. The Magazine, sold to the other founder, so kind of an acquisition?
He's often said that his strategy was to do cool stuff with Apple's newer APIs to maximize the chance for his apps to get featured (eg. the magazine with newsstand).
So whatever Apple announced at WWDC could be a nice hint towards his next venture :)
I released a new podcast app a month ago and it's been doing well to date. Not to compare myself with the aforementioned :) Just saying that if you take the time to understand people's pain points and put a new spin on an old paradigm, there's still opportunity in any area.
Also, who said a podcasting app can't have recurring revenue? TuneIn just raised $25M today and we can be sure it's not for 99 cent app sales. (Not exactly podcasting, but same ball park.)
All depends on where you think we are in the market for podcast apps.
Sounds like Marco is clearing house a bit.
Out with the old, in with the new.
> Don’t worry, Hops isn’t for sale.
I'm not suggesting he's being dishonest or that it won't last, but even the statement you cite indicates it's not currently for sale, and even then, what's the guarantee?
"He and his wife have one child and one dog. Neither is for sale."Instagram was a great product, Magazine a good follow-up.
It is marginally interesting that Magazine ownership is being transferred to Marco's partner, but I don't understand why that merits the #1 ranking on HN :)
Because enough people upvoted it to get it there. The Magazine, although not focussed on tech, I assume attracts a large tech audience (the people on HN). Marco is a well known person in the development community and I'm sure quite a few people saw the post on his blog and submitted here gaining it upvotes.
Instapaper was a little product made by this one guy at home that grew big and I think for that reason, Marco Arment's story appealed to a lot of people here that are hoping to build their own bootstrapped product. And now he's at a later stage where he used the Instapaper success as a stepping stone for more projects, like The Magazine.