Seed to stop selling ads, which won't be hard if it stops publishing too

Seed magazine, the seemingly positioned "Vanity Fair of science," has announced it has stopped selling advertisements,says Mediaweek.

Was that on purpose?

Seed has not appeared since June and its founder said that although its future frequency has not been decided, the next issue will not carry any ads.

Now, the Reaper had Seed marked for death this past August and its certainly looking like its kinda dead. Or on life support, at least. 

However, somebody had better tell the founder that when your magazine hasn't appeared in five months and you don't know when your next issue will come out, if ever, it's doubtful you're going to be getting ads anyway. Some <cough> "wunderkind."

Comments

[Paul Riddell]

I was wondering about that. "Seed" stopped sending me nuhdz notices to get me to resubscribe about that time, and even "New Scientist" still sends the occasional spam notice trying to sell calendars and the like. (I let my subscriptions die on both over three years ago, but that doesn't stop the whining about "coming back" to the fold. At least the science magazines have learned that online reminders have a better chance of working: I let subscriptions to "Asimov's" and "The Comic Buyer's Guide" lapse a decade ago, and I STILL get pathetically worded mendicant letters in Snail Mail every six months about how I'm somehow missing out by not renewing. And don't get me going about "Communication Arts" and "Columbia Journalism Review".)

[msbpodcast]

Seed seems to be surviving only in an online version.

I wonder what its burn-rate is, now that its jettisoned print.

No more paper, no more ink, no more presses, no more postage, no more shipping, no more physical plant, no more salaries for anything but a few writers and an editor.

If the owner has money, it can survive until the world comes to another accomodation over the "free" portion of the phrase: "information wants to be 'free'"

[Ted Craig]

Seed subscriptions are no longer available at Amazon.com.

[Paul Riddell]

Yeah, Ted, and the last issue so far is still sitting in its spot at Barnes & Noble, suggesting that (a) nobody's buying it and (b) the distributor doesn't have anything to replace it with.