Sports Illustrated Falls to the Internet

venecol said:

Are you saying you used to jerk off to the swimsuit models issues?

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DarrylS said:

Grew up on SI it was the best around for many years, subscribed for many years...

Then it tried to venture into new areas and even attempted to get "edgy", that is when I stopped subscribing, occasionally pick up a copy in a Dr.'s office and usually find it disappointing.. it seems to have lost is reason for being printed.

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QuantumMechanic said:

She was only 18 on her first cover.

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robertweathers said:

I was only 13. I liked older women back then

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shmessy said:

Very sad, quite a long and spectacular history, but the media world changes..............

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fnordcircle said:

Sometime in the mid-90s I had a subscription to Patriots Football Weekly. The editor guy - Fred Kirsch I think? - wrote an editorial about how the internet wasn't going to disrupt anything. His prediction was that the big change on the horizon was more cable TV channels offering more focus/specialization.

I mean he's a sports writer not a futurist so I'm not gonna hate on him too much for it, but for some reason that article always stuck with me as a reminder of how we can let our fear of or inability to see change on the horizon coax us into believing the status quo will remain for forever.

So my point is buy bitcoin.

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KontradictioN said:

When I was a kid? Yep.

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Deus Irae said:

It's tough to feel sympathy towards a magazine that brought much of this on to itself with its editorial direction choices.

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Ice_Ice_Brady said:

So I understand that print newspapers have massive problems. I assume that a site like SI.com just doesn’t generate enough ad revenue to pay its staff and make a profit? What kind of numbers do you need to hit in order to be profitable? I always assumed the online edition made money too just because of the huge brand name tons of web traffic, so I guess I was way off.

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Ian said:

Online ad revenue is awful, having dropped quite a bit in the last few years as companies continue shifting their budgets to social platforms, not to mention ad blockers...it's a mess. That's the reason subscription models have become more and more prevalent because things have gotten so bad.

People can slam ads and say what they want, but it's tough to provide a free service that comes at a cost (especially high performance dedicated servers) without having a way to at least pay for it. For me, it's not a big deal because I have a full-time job, so I just need to break even and keep the lights on and I have an emotional connection because all of you have obviously become such big a part of my life that I'll always figure out a way to make it work. In SI's case, they're paying quite a few professional journalists a salary, with the majority of that revenue likely coming from the magazine subscriptions. Whatever they're getting for online ad revenue, it's likely a small percentage compared to the paid subscriptions. And that's also the reason you're seeing more and more newspapers also moving to paywalls because online ad revenue just can't support it.

Granted, there are people who both use ad blockers and say, "I'm not paying, I'll go somewhere else and get it for free", I've seen it said here and I understand why people feel that way. But all you're going to keep seeing is sites go away with new ones appearing, only to see those go away when that person or company decides it's not worth it anymore and then new people/sites pop up to pick up that traffic. The problem is, as this continues, the quality reporting and journalism many of us grew up with will eventually cycle out, news outlets will continue to go away, and not as many people will go to college for it anymore (broadcast and TV remains the only journalism category that continues holding on because the highest paying online category is video) because it's a field that's just extremely volatile.

The category being hit the hardest is quality writing. A lot of millennials don't really like to read very much and don't like to write, so you're not seeing as many younger writers/columnists coming up like we used to see. But they do consume a lot of video. That's why Fox Sports went 100% to video on their site a few years ago. I thought it was a bad move, but they haven't changed it so it must be working. Given the direction things are headed, we'll probably continue to see more of that.

Needless to say, who knows where things will be in another 10/20 years. All I know is when I started this site almost 20-years ago (and my original one in 1997), times were certainly quite different. I don't know if it would even get off the ground now in this climate and honestly, there's not many of us left as it is from that era.

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raduray said:

I'm an avid reader and appreciate good writing. I have little patience for video reports. But I'm 66 years old and my generation is on the wane.

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PatriotsReign said:

All I needed was a bra ad....

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Ian said:

It's really disappointing to see what's going on. I don't like watching video reports either, I'd also prefer to read so this whole evolution blows my mind. But it's funny, think back to all the good writers among all the newspapers back in the 90s and early 2000s, especially the older ones, compared to now. The difference between then and now is staggering.

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robertweathers said:

If you were a kid/teenager in the 80s and loved sports, you read SI. It was then when they started poaching columnists like Leigh Montville, Jack MaCallum, etc. - high quality writers. Used to arrive every Thursday and I'd read it cover to cover that same day.

re: Swimsuit Issue- my teenage "crush" was Paulina Porizkova.

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YOUGOTMOSSED said:

As a kid I remember being enthralled by Cheryl Tiegs in SI even though I didn't quite understand why.

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Ian said:

Online ad revenue is awful, having dropped quite a bit in the last few years as companies continue shifting their budgets to social platforms, not to mention ad blockers...it's a mess. That's the reason subscription models have become more and more prevalent because things have gotten so bad.

People can slam ads and say what they want, but it's tough to provide a free service that comes at a cost (especially high performance dedicated servers) without having a way to at least pay for it. For me, it's not a big deal because I have a full-time job, so I just need to break even and keep the lights on and I have an emotional connection because all of you have obviously become such big a part of my life that I'll always figure out a way to make it work. In SI's case, they're paying quite a few professional journalists a salary, with the majority of that revenue likely coming from the magazine subscriptions. Whatever they're getting for online ad revenue, it's likely a small percentage compared to the paid subscriptions. And that's also the reason you're seeing more and more newspapers also moving to paywalls because online ad revenue just can't support it.

Granted, there are people who both use ad blockers and say, "I'm not paying, I'll go somewhere else and get it for free", I've seen it said here and I understand why people feel that way. But all you're going to keep seeing is sites go away with new ones appearing, only to see those go away when that person or company decides it's not worth it anymore and then new people/sites pop up to pick up that traffic. The problem is, as this continues, the quality reporting and journalism many of us grew up with will eventually cycle out, news outlets will continue to go away, and not as many people will go to college for it anymore (broadcast and TV remains the only journalism category that continues holding on because the highest paying online category is video) because it's a field that's just extremely volatile.

The category being hit the hardest is quality writing. A lot of millennials don't really like to read very much and don't like to write, so you're not seeing as many younger writers/columnists coming up like we used to see. But they do consume a lot of video. That's why Fox Sports went 100% to video on their site a few years ago. I thought it was a bad move, but they haven't changed it so it must be working. Given the direction things are headed, we'll probably continue to see more of that.

Needless to say, who knows where things will be in another 10/20 years. All I know is when I started this site almost 20-years ago (and my original one in 1997), times were certainly quite different. I don't know if it would even get off the ground now in this climate and honestly, there's not many of us left as it is from that era.

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