
Ask YC: A Magazine That Publishes Blogs. Startup Potential? - dkokelley
I had this idea about 10 minutes ago on my way to the mailbox. Since I believe that ideas aren't worth anything on their own, I submit it here to see what you guys think about its potential. Here's the idea:<p>A magazine that finds interesting blogs, bundles them together (maybe with themes), and publishes them in a print magazine.<p>My thoughts on this&#62;<p>People could be exposed to new/interesting blogs that they might not find on their own. They can also read up on their favorite blogs in places that they normally wouldn't be able to (anywhere they don't want to pull their laptop out).<p>There are some pros for blog publishers too: For new and undiscovered writers they can have their blogs featured. More established writers could opt to publish with a revenue sharing model.<p>Of course there are also the articles about Adsense optimization, etc.<p>Another variation of this idea would be a system for bloggers to have their blogs bundled up and printed in a magazine to give as a gift to their readers, similar to amateur musicians making a family and friends CD.<p>Anyways, what do you guys think? Is something like this even feasible? Any gaping holes that I haven't even realized yet? (And remember, I just thought of this a few minutes ago.)
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Mystalic
Actually, despite its, uh, antiquity, I like this idea. Let me explain.

1) Why does everyone think that they'll have trouble from blogs for
republishing? It's huge extra exposure - I feel that you'll get tons of people
interested.

2) Go away from publishing blog posts to stories about the bloggers (egos),
about how they started their idea, features on getting started, new stories by
bloggers, etc. The TOPIC is blogging, not the posts that they've written.
Remember that and you have your focus.

3) It's simply not a topic covered by any major magazine

The bad -

1) Magazines are indeed dying. Ad revenues are down and continue to drop.

2) It's ironic to cover such a new media with such an old one and the irony
will hit people as they read it.

3) You're going to need a good deal of money to start this up and do
circulation.

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dkokelley
Very good points. Yes it does seem to be pretty expensive to print up the
physical magazines.

I'm liking the idea of getting it in an area where the readers may not have
access to the internet (specifically plane rides). If I know I'm going to be
on the plane for 4 hours and I can't use my laptop for the internet, what
better way to calm the panic than by having a magazine full of 10-15 or so
blogs that I can read?

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Jax
Agree with u. As a geek, I would opt to read geeky stuff on magazines when i
dont have access to internet. Here are a few things I suggest you consider.
1.) You can start with the air passengers. And the best thing to do would be
to setup a small stall in the airport or very near to the gate. 2.) Sell in
small number of pages. And sell different volumes per topic. Becoz a geek
would like tech content and a granny would health related content(i didnt ask
my granny). Like one Maybe around 15 pages per-topic per-week, since u only
want to offer them content to be occupie during journey. 3.) when there's blog
content about latest stuff, ur content might be old for readers at the end of
the month. So publish new editions every week. 4.) if u are going to publish
different a volume per topic, then the easiest way of getting content would be
Technorati or any other blog aggregator. 5.) remember: start small. U can
ofcourse start with around 3 topics for different age groups. Like 'gadgets'
for kids, 'talk of the town' kind of content for women and biz for men. 6.) u
can also just start by using a laser printer at home to print(i dont know
about printing, checkout which is economical. 7.) start as a niche magazine
for travellers. u can later expand by setting up stalls at more public travel
stations and other places. 8.) u might get busy with aggregating content. So i
suggest u hire someone to look after the stall. U can find students looking
for partime jobs(getting them might be easy, who doesnt want to read magazines
free?)

i hope u liked the above. And please apologize for using mobile lingo, i am on
my mobile phone :)

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alaskamiller
Sounds like an old idea of a zine. Two problems to tackle:

First, logistics of the physical stuff, thankfully <http://magcloud.com/> was
recently launched so barrier to entry is considerably lower.

Second, getting the permissions from bloggers to syndicate their content.
There's plenty of issues here. Foremost being that most blog content are...
well... blog content. They're pithy, short, fluffy, sugary, whatever. If you
find higher quality material then you have to pay for it. The established
bloggers might not be interested in sharing control of their content.

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mileszs
I think you'd have to pick a 'market', really. If you were targeting politics,
you might be able to make it work. In the tech market, I can't imagine people
opting for the over-priced dead-tree version over our computers, keyboards
glued to our hands and all.

Do note, however, that I'm a tad bitter when it comes to magazines. I would
actually enjoy browsing them if they were not so expensive and the information
not so out-dated (and AdBlock were available as a plugin).

~~~
alaskamiller
Yeah, I wish I could get all my information free. Why can't content publishers
understand this?

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sonink
You might not believe it, but I had the exact same idea sometime back. I think
its brilliant(obviously ;)) - allow me to share some of the things I thought
about.

1\. I think the risk to bloggers not being fine with is overblown. Everybody
loves free publicity - and if some of them are not keen, then just drop them.
The internet is big enough to find enough interesting content.

2\. You can do it in a subscription model. People come to your site and upload
their details - preferences etc. You promise them FREE magazines through mail
covering their topics periodically. They have nothing to loose. Once you have
enough people covered you can get paid for highly targeted ads.

3\. Offline model might work well on an on-demand basis. You might want to tie
up with local printing shops and send them the formatted material on-demand
and always updated. They sense local demand and print based on that. Kind of
like a franchisee model.

4\. The things to highlight are highly targeted content - ( I have never seen
an old school magazine which has more than 15% relevant content to me) and
almost up-to-date - (I rarely see a news item in an old school mag which I
havent read about online)

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bluehatrider
This is not a good idea.

Newspapers and magazines are in trouble.

Ad revenues to newspapers nationwide are down double digits this year. The top
100 advertisers have shifted over $ 1 Billion in ad dollars to the web from
print and tv.

Going from what is growing to what is dying doesn't make any sense dkokelley.

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tonystubblebine
Awhile back Joel Spolsky compiled Best Software Writing I, a collection of
online tech writings from other people.
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BestSoftwareWriting.h...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BestSoftwareWriting.html)

It seems similar to the format you're imagining and was definitely successful
from a quality standpoint. The people who read it, enjoyed reading it.

That's different than saying it was a huge commercial success or that there's
so much good writing that you could fill a themed magazine each month.

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DanielBMarkham
I like this.

Like everything else, though, the trick is finding the sweet spot in the
market where you can make a buck and provide value to other people.

Who is it worth money to, in order to read your mag? Is it people who are
offline -- the internet illiterate? Seems like it would be people looking for
good content and not using one of the aggregation engines/sites out there. I'm
just guessing, but perhaps that is a pretty tight niche. Something like older
people interested in penguin farming but who don't own a computer.

If you can identify/find this niche, then I think you're halfway there. But
the idea is only "cool" because in the back of my mind I think there IS such a
niche. Beats me what it is, though.

Be aware that your niche may not be readers. It could be magazine providers.
For instance, doctor's offices provide magazines for people to read while they
wait. There might be a nice niche in there where you could provide content
based on the doctor's type of practice and clientele. I'm sure you could
identify, for instance, 40,000 foot doctors in the United States. Maybe 20% of
them (I know, Chinese Math, but this is back-of-napkin-stuff) would be
interested in providing internet "recap" material for those waiting in their
office. Eight thousand docs at $40 a year, and you've got a nice niche
business for yourself and maybe a couple other people.

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greyman
Your idea is interesting and might work. One Slovakian daily does something
similar - they have blogs written by their readers (anyone can register one),
and if they find some blog post interesting, they republish it in print (but
they have an agreement with blog writers that they can do that - as a counter-
service for free hosting).

The potential problems of your idea to think about:

1) Many blog posts are written in a conversational style, and their purpose is
to collect relevant links, comment on something, or spark a discussion.
Basically, many blogs can be characterized as conversation platforms -
reprinting them to paper will lose this dimension.

2) For reprinting you would need to pick up essay-like blog posts, which have
their own merit without reader comments or inbound links. And those are not
easy to find, so you can encounter similar issue like "normal" magazines - how
to find good content.

3) When we are really talking about magazine (not newspaper), the important
parts are also design and photos. You will really need (to pay for)
professional photos to make the magazine engaging.

4) distribution - another big pain in the... how will you distribute?

To sum it up, if I would like to make money from blogs, I would rather go to a
path of either:

1) republishing the blogs online (might have sense if you add value by
grouping interesting stuff together)

2) trying to run blog network myself and share revenue with authors

3) start a blog myself and pay writers per post (or per visitor numbers).

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gojomo
Make it a free daily in big cities, so the content is only 24-72 hours older
than when it was blogged, and it might work.

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rms
I doubt it, but it's a cool enough idea that I'd like to see someone try.

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mechanical_fish
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Now>

Based on this sample of one, your doubts are justified: These guys went out of
business in a bit less than 1 year.

Of course, there's a lot of ways to run a paper or magazine, so maybe a
different approach would have worked better. I never found Boston NOW
especially interesting... it was mostly wire-service filler with a sprinkling
of no-name bloggers.

~~~
rms
:) That's really funny.

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dangoldin
A couple of things that came to my mind when I read this:

1\. You will need to get permission from every blog author you want to include
in the magazine

2\. How will you go about finding blogs to include?

3\. People that are interested in reading blogs are pretty handy with Google
and would be able to find relevant posts themselves.

4\. A lot of blogs are very similar to one another and I noticed that any
given day you will have a few blogs writing about the same exact thing. A
monthly, or even weekly, magazine may not be frequent enough to capture
everything of interest to the average blog reader.

An idea you may want to consider is just having "channels" of blogs and then
having people sign up for the various "channels" they are interested in,
providing them with a daily feed of posts. You can also try including this
feed into the Kindle, maybe something can come of that.

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PStamatiou
As an active blogger myself one issue I see, aside from getting bloggers to
agree to this and finding a price they would accept (very few bloggers will do
it for free, unless this publication becomes popular), is the fact that many
blog posts simply aren't of publishable quality. If someone told me they
wanted to pick a random article of mine and publish it, I would definitely
want to edit it first. Web content doesn't entirely work well as print unless
tweaked.

The other issue is.. will people used to reading blogs actually read print
material of the same type of content? The nature of some of the content might
make it outdated and so on

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jakewolf
Don't worry about the tiny percentage of people who read every blog in the
world. For most of the population, paper still works. A good editor could pull
a great weekly off.

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gmayerson
You mean like a magazine of blog essays like the Journal of Bloglandia, ISSN
1940-7645? <http://wapshottpress.com/j-bloglandia/>

Issue 1 is on sale at Amazon and Lulu. We're looking for essays for Issue 2.
If any of you would like to send me an essay formatted correctly on the
template, I'm sure I'd love to print it.

Ginger Mayerson

Editor, J Bloglandia

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Tichy
I think it exists, but I can't remember the name. Shelf-something? It was on
HN several times (or their blog was).

Personally I don't care for the idea. A good accumulator of interesting
content is OK, but I don't like physical magazines (they tend to clutter my
home and I hardly ever read them anyway). Make it readable on mobile phones,
that would be sufficient for me.

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dkokelley
Thanks for the input so far, guys. I do want to ad that if I were to try
something like this I would probably not publish much tech content. Tech savvy
readers already get the blogs they want.

I'm thinking more along the lines of businesspeople - "Blogs for the rest of
us" you could say. Is there a potential demand for blogs off of the internet?

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Alex3917
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=59248>

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sanj
I'd like a variant of this:

blog => [annotated, photo] book

Many of my friends are popping out kids lately. They have beautiful pictures
and witty comments. I'd like that bound and organized into a book.

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colortone
some one has already done this, can't find it right now...

the key is to have the magazine be custom made by the subscriber

i.e. outsource the editorial to the user

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utnick
sounds like a decent idea. make a few niche magazines and then put them in
vending machines at airports. i would probably buy

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chriskelley
Niche markets are definitely the way to go. I'm in the VFX world, and there is
a DVD "Mag" (same idea, different format) that basically collates the best
spots from the last couple months and sends the DVD out to subscribers. The
spots are nothing subscribers haven't already seen, but it's always great to
see things in their full beauty on screen, as well as having the tangible
product to put on the shelf.

There is something to be said for the beauty of the printed word - I say go
for it. Good luck!

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volodia
Why don't you publish your magazine online? There's alltop.com that does
something like this already, but I can see ways to make it better.

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dkokelley
Publishing the magazine of blogs online defeats the purpose somewhat. :)

