Also, ad sales in print computer magazines fell off a cliff after 2001 and never recovered. (Last time I looked, the ad page count in CS had dropped to about 200 pages, from a peak of nearly 600 pages.)
The drop was due to (a) lots of the smaller PC OEMs merging or going bust (a mag could only sell so many 12-24 page glossy advertising segments to Dell or HP), (b) the rise of internet advertising on the back of home broadband (over a 56K modem ads were painful; with 512K and up broadband they were tolerable and far more effective), and (c) dwindling profit margins.
Oh, also CS had two distinct customer bases: the hardcore folks who bought it for the specialist columns (the UK mag, unlike the Ziff-Davis Computer Shopper, had stuff like assembly language programming tutorials and an Atari ST enthusiast's corner as late as 2004) and who propped up the ABC circulation figures by subscribing (and whose ABC figures in turn were used by sales to convince advertisers that the magazine was worth purchasing space in), and the newsstand casuals, who wanted a new PC, would buy an issue for the ads, buy their PC, then never buy another copy. And of these latter, according to market surveys, only 15% ever installed any software on their machine: they bought from OEMs with Windows and Office pre-installed along with a bunch of not-quite-crapware, and used what they'd bought as-is.
The former vanished first, to places like Slashdot, Hacker News, and more recondite corners of the web. And the latter dried up as google made it easier to find cheap PCs via the internet.
Also, ad sales in print computer magazines fell off a cliff after 2001 and never recovered. (Last time I looked, the ad page count in CS had dropped to about 200 pages, from a peak of nearly 600 pages.)
The drop was due to (a) lots of the smaller PC OEMs merging or going bust (a mag could only sell so many 12-24 page glossy advertising segments to Dell or HP), (b) the rise of internet advertising on the back of home broadband (over a 56K modem ads were painful; with 512K and up broadband they were tolerable and far more effective), and (c) dwindling profit margins.
Oh, also CS had two distinct customer bases: the hardcore folks who bought it for the specialist columns (the UK mag, unlike the Ziff-Davis Computer Shopper, had stuff like assembly language programming tutorials and an Atari ST enthusiast's corner as late as 2004) and who propped up the ABC circulation figures by subscribing (and whose ABC figures in turn were used by sales to convince advertisers that the magazine was worth purchasing space in), and the newsstand casuals, who wanted a new PC, would buy an issue for the ads, buy their PC, then never buy another copy. And of these latter, according to market surveys, only 15% ever installed any software on their machine: they bought from OEMs with Windows and Office pre-installed along with a bunch of not-quite-crapware, and used what they'd bought as-is.
The former vanished first, to places like Slashdot, Hacker News, and more recondite corners of the web. And the latter dried up as google made it easier to find cheap PCs via the internet.