The Magazine is making a book (again) and shutting down (what?!) →
Glenn Fleishman:
The sad truth has been that, while profitable from week one, the publication has had a declining subscription base since February 2013. It started at such a high level that we could handle a decline for a long time, but despite every effort — including our first-year anthology crowdfunded a bit under a year ago — we couldn’t replace departing subscribers with new ones fast enough.
I’m sad to see this go, but I’m unfortunately not surprised — the decline began under my ownership, and I couldn’t turn it around. Glenn wanted to give it a shot, so he took over, and took it far further and for much longer than I thought possible.
Many non-ideal factors and decisions I made up front probably contributed to The Magazine not being sustainable forever. But the biggest challenge was simply that running a magazine today is a really tough business. I thought making a high-quality app was the hard part that was keeping iPad magazines from being more successful, but the app turned out to be the easiest and least important part of the business.