New content under the line of mining lines

In a time when everything seems to be free now, Hacker Monthly has taken the form of offline paid distribution of online content, and the unexpected success of Hacker Monthly is a revelation for those content creators who suffer from the Internet.

Someone might think, who would be stupid enough to pay to see what was originally free on the Internet?

In a time when everything seems to be free the traditional publishing industry is struggling to find a new direction, and Internet content creators are also facing a paradox: the production of works although their dissemination effect greatly enhanced, but the volume of browsing has not brought direct benefits, At the same time, those features that are easily copied also cause the value of content to shrink.

It is in this context that Hacker Monthly-a magazine that will rearrange and package the digital content of the Hacker news (a social news service area) on the offline form of a print or ebook, not only fails, but starts to make a profit, We can't help but be excited. Has the publishing industry finally found a way to develop for this era?

The launch of Hacker Monthly

Hacker Monthly's founder, Lim Cheng Soon, launched the project for a simple reason: as a death-loyalty to Hacker News, he also faces the pervasive problem of information overload in the Internet age, and in order to be able to really focus on quality articles, he decided to The most popular articles on Hacker News are collected and printed into an entity magazine online for reading. Hacker Monthly can attract a lot of people's attention, and eventually get subscribers, advertisers Welcome to become a real business, it is entirely unexpected.

So far, Hacker Monthly has issued 23-month and 3-issue series, with more than 5,000 subscribers worldwide. Of the 88-dollar annual print edition and the 29-dollar ebook edition, only 5% of subscribers chose the print edition. The figure may not seem very visible, but for Lim, two-bit editors and a design Hacker Monthly, the print edition brings in nearly 20000 dollars of revenue, which is expected to be around 130000 dollars a year, plus the full page ad revenue of the magazine, Sustainable development is fully achievable. After a few months of its inception, Lim resigned from his consulting and outsourcing work and devoted himself to the work of Hacker Monthly magazine.

The pattern of Hacker Monthly

Hacker Monthly process is very simple: from the Hacker News on the manual selection of suitable articles, by the editor for a simple touch to make it suitable for planar distribution, and then by the art of landscaping. Article selection criteria is also very simple: an article as long as the support of more than 100 people, really in line with Hacker News "to meet the reader's knowledge of curiosity" spirit can be selected.

For each candidate, Lim will find a way to get in touch with the author, with the consent of the final entry into the magazine, each selected author will receive a print version of the magazine and a year of digital subscriptions. In most cases, authors are happy to publish their own articles.

The success of Hacker Monthly largely benefited from the excellent community of Hacker News. The Y-combinator-sponsored news-sharing community is popular with programmers and entrepreneurs for its excellent share of articles and a high quality community discussion atmosphere. Hacker Monthly's audience is also precisely this group, Lim to the community of the mass content of the selection and refinement, in a more beautiful, more suitable for in-depth reading of the form of repackaging, is hitting this small crowd demand G-point. Moreover, the Hacker News article's author's approval is the final determinant of the publication of the magazine.

From line to line-more optimized reading

(It should be noted that the line below is not limited to print versions.) In this digital era, digital publishing has become an irreversible trend, eventually replacing traditional publishing. )

Hacker Monthly is not a case of optimizing online content, publishing it offline, and succeeding. Ars Technica, who publishes its columnist John Siracusa's detailed Mac OS X Lion in E-book format, received 3,000 orders in less than 24 hours; ProPublica the website's excellent article in the Kindle singles form the sale, has obtained the very good result in the Kindle singles, Ifanr will own the domestic many entrepreneur's interview to compile a book, published "The Seed" one, also receives the reader's praise; In addition, such as the 36kr Krypton Weekly, the weekly selection and so the essence of the site to screen, together, in a more linear form to the reader's form, but also to bring users a good reading experience, creating new value for the content.

In a sense, this pattern is very similar to the past mailing list, but as the Internet content environment changes, this pattern has changed. Why is this kind of content from online to offline mode will be widely welcomed by users?

On the one hand, the proliferation of Internet information has increased user information overload. In this case, more information will not bring more knowledge, but more and more serious information anxiety, which is particularly important for the Internet heavy users.

At the same time, in the vast amount of information, the real value of content, although the absolute number of increase, but the relative proportion has decreased, which makes the discovery of high-quality content of time and human costs greatly increased.

However, Hacker Monthly is the most important advantage of this kind of offline reading form restriction. Because of their quantitative limitations, they need to select the best quality parts from a large number of online content, which makes the content of the offline publication much denser than the Web site.

On the other hand, Internet page design still belongs to a professional work, for many content creators, they do not have the energy and lack of skills to optimize the reading experience on the web, not to mention that many sites in order to profit, on the site to hang a variety of nuisance ads, This makes it much more inconvenient to read Internet reading that is somewhat difficult.

For the offline form of content distribution, readability is one of the most important factors to consider, so they are in the design and reading experience to the traditional plane publishing standards, while for digital publishing, they also integrate the advantages of Internet reading. This is one of the reasons why it is popular with users.

From line to line-content new value

Compared to the traditional publishing, Ars Technica article more than 3,000 of the purchase volume is quite small, ifanr "seed" the actual sale is not big, and 36kr Krypton weekly such as free electronic weekly subscription is not small, but not for 36KR to bring direct profits.

For content creators that originate on the line, the offline distribution does not make much profit, compared to the amount of revenue generated by the page's browsing volume. But on the one hand, these profits are entirely independent of the site's additional revenue, the more the better, at the same time, with the evolution and improvement of digital publishing, the value of this channel will have a great space for improvement; On the other hand, by publishing online, creators can maintain and consolidate relationships with both readers and open a path to discovering new readers ( The number of paid subscribers to the site has also increased significantly after the launch of Ars Technica's MAC OS X evaluation booklet. Without considering the manpower and time required to publish offline publishing, this form can be a benefit to content creators.

To put it another way, these selected offline offerings are mostly based on the editorial-led Top-down recommendation model, more often targeted at the public's appetite, but not necessarily tailored to the personalized needs of some users. Users in the vast amount of information found that valuable information has indeed increased, but their contact with the content is also greatly increased, which will inevitably appear in the user's personal interest, but not necessarily the mainstream recommended content, then like Instapaper, readability such "read later" Class services also provide users with personalized online content transfer to the offline content consumption; In addition, some personalized recommendations based on user social relationships and interest networks provide a new way to explore the value of on-line content offline.