How to lose your readers in three easy steps.

Step 1.
Publish a great magazine with excellent photography and well-written articles.

Step 2.
Announce a tie-in with a mediocre web forum.

Step 3. Stop printing the magazine and move everything to the mediocre website.

I used to read a really good motorcycling magazine called TWO - Two Wheels Only. A year or so ago they started a big tie-in with visordown.com - a myspace-like website that was littered with abominable design, popup ads and a forum full of people with tourette's. Then in September last year, the magazine disappeared from the shelves of my newsagent completely. I figured there was a printing delay or something so I waited a while but come November, still no TWO. No Christmas special either - WTF? Eventually I googled it and discovered they'd simply stopped printing the magazine and turned it into part of visordown.com. The website has undergone a redesign so it's not quite so nasty now but it's still impossible to navigate.
The bigger problem is that it's not a magazine. I can't take it on an aircraft. I can't read it on a train or in the toilet. I can't take it on a ride to browse through after a long day's corner carving.
I can't see any business sense in what they've done but they must have lost almost their entire readership by doing this.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Buy you and iPad (or equivalent Android based screen) and your back in business. Just try not to get any poop on it ;-)

(I know, it doesn't make up for the fact that it's on a crappy website ...... hey, I just made a pun)
16:51
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