I've been a long time subscriber to Control Engineering and I wish the employees all the best.

http://www.controleng.com/article/456743-Control_Engineering_has_closed.php

 

I can't say I am all that surprised. I was once a subscriber, and really enjoyed the magazine and found it had good content. Somewhere along the line I lost interest when it turned into something that merely regurgitated press releases from advertisers.

 

>I wish the employees all the best.

Me, too. It's an ugly world out there right now. It's hard to see how that mag would be unprofitable with 100% advertising. And unlike most casualties in the print business, there isn't really a "new media" villain to blame. Perhaps it's just too small a market and getting smaller. One could also read the title in a more general sense. Some of the inquiries we see here make me think that decision makers actually believe that "Anyone can do it" hype.

Regards
cww

 

I also wish the employees the best. I can see why the advertising did not pay off very well. Have you tried to advertise with trade magazines? The cost to the vendor is way out of line, in my opinion. Perhaps lowering the cost would increase the advertising volume and the profit margins with it.

Anyway I hope the people can find work they enjoy.
Ron

 

Yes, it is a mystery, but they have some basis for charging like they do. The mag is highly targeted and an advertisers dream, you actually get people who _want_ to read even thinly veiled advertising as content and are blasted with overt ads on every page. The smart advertisers are the ones who provide "content" as they win the war for eyeballs over even the most attractive picture ads. What you didn't see much is "I selected this from this major advertiser and this from that major advertiser and we did this stuff ourselves." type articles. Or articles that favored non-advertisers. But one would think that it was working by the sheer volume of advertising. It will be interesting to see what fills the void. Automation types are hard to reach in any other way. But telling them how to do something gets their eyeballs.

Regards
cww

 

It appears there's a move afoot to keep CE going. I just heard from one of the editors that the management team is purchasing the publication and will continue Control Engineering into the future.

Perhaps with its new ownership it will be more contentful. It's certainly difficult for print publications to find successful business models in the new media world -- times have changed considerably since Ed Kompass ran CE back in the olden times.

 

I used to read the (print) version of Control Engineering regularly, or rather it used to take up room on my desk. I would try to find the time to flip through it, quite honestly mainly for the ads. These days however, I can find something via Google a lot easier than by pawing through a pile of old magazines.

In the pre-Internet days, magazines like Control Engineering used to be (along with trade shows) the main way you found out what was going on in the market. Is there a new sensor that you might want to use? Does vendor 'X' have a new product line coming out? Etc. Now, every vendor has their own web site and Google will find them for you. We don't need the trade magazines to act as a "paper Internet" for us anymore. Control Engineering has to find another reason to exist.

I think a specialist trade publication like that has to abandon print entirely and concentrate on their web site in order to eliminate their printing and distribution costs. To do that they also need to abandon the traditional monthly publishing cycle and go to a continuous update model. The ads need to be there to pay the bills, but there also needs to be enough content give people a reason to go there.

Stories should also try to spark user comments rather than just being bland PR reprints. Many web sites have found that it is the debate on the user forums which keep people coming back. However, there has to be something for the readers to talk *about*.

Their current web page layout is terrible and needs to be drastically simplified. It's currently just a jumble of different things with an apparent effort to pack as many things as possible into a single page.

There's a lot of things they can do, but the most important is to give up on print entirely, and focus on bringing in readers to their web site every day. If they simply continue on as they were, I don't think they will succeed.

 

We seem to be doing just fine, Ken. Our business model is working quite well, actually.

I'm hoping that the management team can raise the money. I don't know any banks or v/c firms that are lending magazines to people who want to resurrect a dead magazine. I would love to have a good competitor, and I would hate to have a poor one.

Walt Boyes
Editor in Chief
Control and ControlGlobal.com
555 W. Pierce Rd Suite 301
Itasca, IL 60143

wboyes [at] putman.net
www.controlglobal.com