After 30 years in print, the current August issue of PCWorld will be the last, IDG announced today. The magazine will switch to a digital-only format from now on.
There are 339,000 print subscribers, per the title’s AAM audit report, and if they want it, they’ll need to register online to receive the digital version of the title.
If I have to explain why, you haven’t been paying attention to the media business for the past decade or so. The web has been awfully hard on magazines, and no category has suffered more than computer publications. Both readers and advertisers have largely moved online. Many of them did so years ago — especially the sort of tech-savvy people who once read PC magazines. At the end, PCWorld was about a quarter the size it once was in terms of pages and had lost two-thirds of its readership. I don’t even want to think about what had happened to its profits.
Thus it goes.