[Phil Yearout]

I once took a job as the advertising manager for a small local magazine. The publisher told me, “you don’t make money from subscriptions, you make money from advertising.” I found it to be a “chicken/egg” sort of thing: it’s hard to sell advertising when you don’t have circulation/readers data to show potential advertisers. I became more of a circulation manager trying to increase readership, and that didn’t align with the publisher’s philosophy so I moved on. The magazine was a nice idea but it folded after a few issues. The Cotes were operating in a very narrow niche market, and while I expect their advertising revenue was fairly constant, I’d guess that increasing that revenue and the circulation revenue to keep ahead of increasing costs was difficult. JMO.