Vagabond Explorer Magazine Now Free

Hello LAbackpacker,

It would be great if you could make a mention of the mag on your blog! Thanks!

You can link to the magazine’s landing page if you would like, which is http://www.vagabondjourney.com/magazine/ Thanks!

Let me know if you make a mention of it and I will FB and Tweet it, and include excerpts in the promo material. Thanks again.

Hello Alex,

These are all good points. I would not say I threw in the towel on this project yet, but the change monetization strategies is a move to save it. There is pretty much two ways for a magazine to make money: paying users and advertisers. These two strategies are often mutually exclusive endeavors, as the more people you can get the mag in front of the more money you can charge advertisers, and if you charge per download 100X less people will read it. But if you don’t charge, you are not going to make any money from readers. So it is a Catch-22 of sorts. I tried charging at first to see if this model could hold promise, but downloads were so few that there was absolutely no indication that this model would ever be successful. Even many readers of this site who have been around for years and years did not shed $5 for a copy of Vagabond Explorer. My thinking is that if I can’t even sell this thing to the long term support base here, I can’t really sell it to anyone.

There was also only a very weak connection between promotion and sales. This mag was being sold on Travellerspoint.com, Travelblogs.com, and other BIG sites, and the sales could be counted on one set of fingers. NBC LA even did a prime time TV news segment on one of the stories in Vol.1 — showing screenshots of the mag and linking to it on their website — and, again, the sales resulting from this could be counted on a single hand. This was a huge wake up call. If I saw some pattern of promotion leading to sales, for sure I would pay into promoting it, but that pattern is not there.

I also believe that going from a “first issue free” to a paid system would just meant that I would get a lot of downloads for Vol.1 and nobody coming back for issue 2 haha. So I have to say here that the “reader supported, low advertising method” is not going to work — now or ever — for a pdf download travel mag. There is already so much digital information on travel out there that the “buy now” button is a huge stop sign.

In point, there were more downloads on the first day of the mag being announced as being free than in the past two and a half months of it being sold. The strategy now is to distribute the mag as far and wide as possible, raise the download numbers into the thousands, then approach advertisers with the attempt to fund vol. 2.

Actually, the amount of money that I need to keep this project going is not much. If I was able to sell 500 issues of vol.1, I could confidently do vol. 2 with the hopes of selling a thousand. But I did not come close to selling 500 — no way. But now that they are free, they are flying off the shelves, so to speak. It is my impression that there is interest in this mag, but 99% of the people who are interested are not willing to pay even a nominal amount of money for it.

You, and a good handful of others, are rare people these days haha. There are not many like you who are willing to financially support such a project. I truly thank you for this.