I totally agree that digital copies should be free. I think that you will get much more exposure and the advertisements will pay for the magazine, you shouldn't need to charge for downloads.
This is of course true, but only works if there is guaranteed advertising space. If the bitcoin world wasn't so small, I would tend to be a little more confident on the advertising part of it. Again, we're not talking about not being able to produce it-- most anyone in the bitcoin world could afford to do a magazine where the only lose money, but it would be futile and businesses don't work or grow that way. Bottom line, if no one is interested, no one is interested. Our job as I see it, is to provide as many opportunities to both interest people and keep them interested as possible. Beyond that, you can't change figures, and those figures lean towards the magazine not being sustainable by advertisements alone until the readership is at or above the 50,000 reader mark. Obviously could be wrong, but it's what I honestly believe at present.
Or you know that service that let's you download a file if you tweet it. Like
this, this way everyone needs to tweet the message in order to download the magazine, so they are contributing a little but.
Our Marketing Director, Mihai Alisie had proposed this to me, and we considered it long and hard, but being able to pay for the magazine's necessary printing eventually won out.
I will definitely purchase an ad slot, probably the 1/4 page. It would be awesome to be in issue #1.
I appreciate that greatly. Your support will help us get closer to the point that the print issue price drops and delivering it digitally for free will be a possibility. I also agree with your sentiments. This glossy, thick and high quality magazine will be printed to industry standards. Any business that advertises with us will claim a place in history as all back issues will display their advertising as well. Who wouldn't want that, even if it were a message that said "Hi Mom"?
You should list your advertising prices in Bitcoin...
Again, good idea but in reality doesn't work too well considering we are unable to pay for printing supplies and services in bitcoins, and the market volitility is too high at present. (What would happen if you paid 1BTC for an advertisement and bitcoin's value halved the very next day when we went to pay for printing fees? The magazine would not survive.)
What is the magazine called?
The codename is "BitTalk Magazine", as a release of BitTalk Media who also owns BitTalk.TV. The published name will be different based on what country it is published and marketed to, and that will be released at the time of printing. Right now you can refer to it as "BitTalk Magazine".
Can you share a picture of the cover?
I'm still designing the cover (usually it comes last, after all the other articles are finished and arranged) and I will put it as well as a sample of some of the internal pages in a separate thread when they are done.
I truly appreciate all the questions and I am here to assist in anything regarding the advertisements or subscriptions anytime.
Matthew