(Note: This is the first magazine I can remember buying. I got it at my local bike shop, Goodales back in 1999. I had magazine before that but they were mostly copies of Plus and Snap my Mom was able to grab me from the library she worked at)
Whenever I go back to my Mom’s house in New Hampshire for Christmas, I have a routine where I always end up digging out a stack of old magazines and re-reading them all. Which is weird, because when we get current magazines delivered to the house I usually just look at the photos and throw them away. But I have a lot of memories from all those old issues, so looking through them is always fun even if I still remember them all pretty well. It’s not like I’m going to look through them and notice something funny from back in the day. They’re just comforting.
Magazines were different in the late 90′s. There were a million companies just dying to advertise, so there was a period of time where issues of Ride were well over 200 pages (the latest issue is just over 80 pages). In the magazine world, the pages of content you get to put out are directly tied to how many ads there are. So when there’s a ton of advertising, there’s a ton of content and when there’s not, the magazine ends up 82 pages. It’s kind of got a weird circular-logic thing going on. When there are a lot of advertisers, there’s a lot of content, so there’s more reason for someone to buy the magazine, so sales go up, and when sales go up, the magazine can charge more for ads. But when the ads stop, consumers have less reasons to buy an issue since there’s less content, so the number of reader’s goes down and then the magazine either has to charge less, or just lose advertisers to cheaper alternatives. Sucks for them.
The blog world is different. Out here, we create content and then we sell ads on those page views. So if I can get The Come Up 2 million page views a month (we’re around there), we have 2 million pages worth of ads to sell. If I can double that number to 4 million, then we have double the impressions to serve and we make twice as much money. Sounds easy, but it’s harder than it sounds. It’s hard to change human behavior. But we do what we can.
Back when magazines had all those ad dollars coming in from every direction, they had tons of pages to fill so they printed all kinds of stuff that they would never print now. Every magazine had a music section where various pro riders would write about CD’s that they got in the mail. Who wanted to read Leigh Ramsdell dissing a Jock Jams CD, Mike Laird talking up Hatebreed or Brian Tunney talking about how Braid made him feel inside? Not everyone, but it was something to print that some percentage of the magazine’s audience would read. There were pages to fill so it happened.
They printed all kinds of other crap too. When you look at a magazine now, you’re looking at a product where the content has been trimmed down to the bare necessities. Now, the news is pared down to a page or so. But back then magazine would routinely devote 6 or more pages just to the news. They’d print bike checks, product reviews, lengthy letters columns… anything they could to fill space. Some of it was interesting and a lot of it wasn’t.
A few months ago I was looking at an old magazine and my brain started buzzing. All that fluff has disappeared from magazines due to their space limitations. But in the blogging world, we don’t have those same constraints. We can print whatever want and if people read it, we get more page views and more opportunities to monetize our traffic. If nobody reads it, we lose nothing except whatever time or energy we spent creating it. That’s why Chicken & Rice exists, that’s why Gutstains’ blog is launching later this week and that’s why today we launched Ask TCU.
With Ask TCU, I want to capture the fun of the letters section that magazine’s have. Luckily, this is a formula that works much better online than in print. We can answer questions every day instead of once a month. If we answer your question and you still have more you want to know, you can fire right back with another question. You can pose your question towards myself, Brett, Devin, Gutstains or any of the other columnists we’re bringing on board.
All you’ve got to do is fill out this form (or ask on our Facebook or Twitter, although you’re more likely to get a response by filling out the form). What I really want this to accomplish is to make TCU more of a conversation. I get emails, Facebook messages, tweets and blog comments that ask us questions and criticize what we do over here, but up until now we haven’t had a place to address those concerns. We can’t promise that we’ll answer every question, but I’m interested to see what comes of this so send some shit in and we’ll see how it goes.
This kind of segmentation just makes so much sense for a blog like TCU. You see big magazine sites do it all the time (look at a struggling old media site like XXL where they try to cover each section of the magazine in one website) but I think we have an advantage. XXL is a popular magazine (to the extent that any music magazine is still popular) who are attempting to re-create their magazine online. We are a very simple, focused blog that is now attempting to create more online real estate through diversifying our coverage. The more time you spend on TCU every day, the more stuff you click on, the more videos you watch, the more comements you leave, the better for us. The good thing for you, the reader, is that we gain nothing if you guys don’t love these sections. If Ask TCU becomes the kind of thing that you look forward to every day and click on religiously, that’s a huge win for us. If you hate it and decide right now that you’re going to permanently ignore it, we lose and it’ll be replaced with something we think can generate more interest.
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