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Date:      Tue, 17 Apr 2001 23:22:17 -0700
From:      "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com>
To:        "Chris Coleman" <chrisc@vmunix.com>, "Greg Lehey" <grog@lemis.com>
Cc:        <core@daemonnews.org>, <newbies@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   RE: [dn-core] Re: Daemonnews Magazine
Message-ID:  <006501c0c7cf$ead41860$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0104172235290.58715-100000@vnode.vmunix.com>

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>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG
>[mailto:owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Chris Coleman

>I am encouraged that people are anxious to receive the magazines and you
>won't be disappointed.  They are very high quality and only improving.
>
>However, I am a bit discouraged by the lack of subscribers.  To be
>perfectly honest, we have 800 subscribers, nearly half of them are
>International.  I can't see us keeping the print magazine alive if more
>people don't take an interest in it.  $24.95 isn't that big a price to pay
>to have a BSD magazine.  Daemon News has a total of four part time
>employees who handle the shipping and office duties, so we aren't getting
>rich off this.  Everyone else is volunteer.  The magazine is expensive to
>print and we have had to eat a lot of the cost.
>

Hi Chris,

  Be patient, patient, patient!  I write a regular column for a computer
magazine that's local to my hometown and they have been in operation for
ten years now and are still mainly being distributed for free.  I think your
doing pretty good if you have 800 subscribers after only a few issues being
printed, I think it's going to take you 2 years before you really get going
in terms of subscriptions, hang in there buddy!

>FreeBSD has a purported userbase of 2.5 million and 800 subscribers is
>what percentage of that?  Add in NetBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin and BSD/OS.
>

Don't forget that the majority of those users obtain copies of FreeBSD for
merely the cost of their ISP connection via FTP over the Internet.  How
many are regular subscribers to Walnut Creek?  That's the userbase stats
you should care about - since those are folks that value FreeBSD enough to
part with some money for it.

>Its time to start advocating.
>

I'd suggest looking again at the Daemonnews homepage.  Believe it or not,
when
I first saw in the mailing list that you guys were doing a print magazine I
went to the website, looking to sign up, and search as I might I couldn't
see a scrap of HTML that referred to it.  I checked again, once or twice,
over the following months and still didn't see anything so I figured "Oh,
another
bogus rumor" and forgot about it.

I was very surprised to get a promo copy of the magazine a couple weeks ago
for a magazine I didn't think existed! :-)  (I'm even more surprised and a
little
disappointed that it's issue 3 since I'd like to get a copy of issue 2)

Anyway, even today looking at http://www.daemonnews.org there is no menu
link to
the hardcopy of the magazine at the top menu.  There is a sidebar - but you
have to
click on it to get to the mag, and there's no text in the sidebar saying
that it's
a magazine.  I'd suggest that right next to the "Get BSD" red menu item, you
have a
"Daemon News Magazine" red menu item.


Ted Mittelstaedt                      tedm@toybox.placo.com
Author of:          The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide
Book website:         http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com



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