The sad news from Dr Dobb's Journal is that it is being closed at the end of this year or, more accurately, "Sunset":
Our parent company, United Business Media (UBM), has decided to sunset Dr. Dobb's. "Sunset" sounds like a marketing euphemism to avoid saying "closing down," but in this context, it has a specific meaning that "closing" does not convey. That is, that there will be no new content after year end; however, all current content will be accessible and links to existing Dr. Dobb's articles will continue to work correctly. It is the equivalent of a product coming to end of life. It still runs, but no new features will be added.
Although Dr Dobb's has consistently delivered extremely high quality content for programmers, it sounds like it is a victim in the decline in web advertising. Going into the reasons for the closure:
In one word, revenue. Four years ago, when I came to Dr. Dobb's, we had healthy profits and revenue, almost all of it from advertising. Despite our excellent growth on the editorial side, our revenue declined such that today it's barely 30% of what it was when I started. While some of this drop is undoubtedly due to turnover in our sales staff, even if the staff had been stable and executed perfectly, revenue would be much the same and future prospects would surely point to upcoming losses. This is because in the last 18 months, there has been a marked shift in how vendors value website advertising. They've come to realize that website ads tend to be less effective than they once were. Given that I've never bought a single item by clicking on an ad on a website, this conclusion seems correct in the small.
(Additional background on Dr Dobb's is at wikipedia, if you need it.)
Spotted via Hacker News.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 17 2014, @03:36PM
Sad to see them go. But the writing was on the wall for them years ago.
My need for Dr Dobbs and MSJ ended years ago. For a couple of reasons. One I can search for whatever I am interested in and find a few subject matter experts fairly quickly. Secondly my compile times went from 2-3 hours to less than a min. I suspect I am not alone...
(Score: 2, Interesting) by SecurityGuy on Wednesday December 17 2014, @03:52PM
I used to read DDJ a lot as a kid. No doubt it's part of why I'm in this field today.
(Score: 5, Funny) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday December 17 2014, @03:54PM
> even if the staff had been stable and executed perfectly
Imperfect executions of unstable staff certainly can impact the bottom line in any business. We had a woman here called Elaine. Nice lady, good worker. She used to take care of some filing, manage meeting room bookings, answer the phones, maybe some light customer support if the CS team were busy. Anyway, we noticed her becoming less and less stable, psychiatrists couldn't help, eventually went nutty as squirrel shit. So obviously we arranged to have her whacked, but the hitman botched it. I say hitman, it was actually Big Geoff from stores; he lured her down to the warehouse on some lame pretext and tried to run her over with a forklift. Of course she suspected him (maybe she wasn't as paranoid as we thought) dodged the forklift and escaped. Came back a week later and took out half the engineering team and completely trashed the second floor kitchen before Duncan from accounts took her down with a Rexel Gladiator. Don't know how much that little episode cost the company, but it I wouldn't be surprised if it ran into millions.
Still it was a rare case of upper management actually learning from it's mistakes - Months later, when Duncan started to come a little unhinged on account of the PTSD, we hired a proper assassin to bump him off one Monday morning with a car bomb on the school run. We might have paid more up front but it was a really clean job, and I know for a fact it saved the company money in the long run. You have to respect real professional wetwork.
If anyone wants the guy's number, PM me.
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Wednesday December 17 2014, @07:31PM
Bravo!
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday December 18 2014, @04:58AM
Sounds like you've been getting inspiration from BOFH stories. Good job.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 17 2014, @04:09PM
"Given that I've never bought a single item by clicking on an ad"
Neither have I. In fact, I can't think of a single person that ever bought anything by clicking on a web ad. Does anyone actually do this? I was always surprised by the fact that web ads lasted as long as they did, it must mean that people actually buy things from them or else who would use them to advertise? No surprise that, after so many years, advertisers are finally starting to realize that no one ever clicks them. It's surprising it took them this long to realize this though.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday December 17 2014, @04:43PM
It's surprising it took them this long to realize this though.
A theory I've been working on, in the spirit of bad money always chases out good money, is bad advertising always chases out good advertising.
With a banner add you can track each viewer and each ad clicker (if there are any) and exactly what experience they have and revenue generated off each individual ad. At least if the implementation isn't screwed up.
So, a "good" ad platform like banner ads are always susceptible to being discontinued because its possible to generate a financial report with total cost of an online banner ad campaign on one side and total revenue from everyone who clicked it on the other side. Sometimes the net is going to be a negative number.
However, a "bad" ad platform like a radio commercial on your local FM broadcast station at 2am has no possible financial report, no way to track or generate a report. Therefore it can't be cancelled aside from fuzzy feelings. Its not possible to generate a number, therefore its not possible to generate a negative number.
In the long run the "bad" ad platform will on average get more money than the "good" ad platform, so in the long run, its a race to annihilate legacy broadcast media before the buzz disappears from online and online is abandoned. Who's going out of business first, my local newspaper or Google? Well, that seems pretty obvious. OK now try who's going out of business first, Google or the NFL? Hmm well good luck there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 18 2014, @05:02AM
i think you were close with bad chasing out the good but you went down the wrong path - even though your observations and descriptions of that path were accurate. people used to click on ads in the 90s. they were fairly straightforward and honest back then. now, most ads are worthless. you can get viruses from clicking such things. they've grown obnoxious. so, people ignore them or block them.
i imagine its very similar to TV commercials. in the 50s and 60s, TV commercials were probably much more effective than they are today. there may be a little element of 'information overload' to this story as well.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Leebert on Wednesday December 17 2014, @05:16PM
In 2000, I got a Capital One credit card through a (static, non-obnoxious) banner ad on Yahoo!. That was back when I was a young'un trying to actually establish credit, which was fairly difficult (at least, at the time). Although I don't use it usually, I do actually still have it. That ad paid for itself many, many, many times over, I have no doubt.
I also became aware of some products I otherwise wouldn't have been aware of at the time through banner ads. The most prominent example coming to mind is Splunk.
Sometimes, when I'm searching for something very specific, I'll click on the pretty non-intrusive Google ads. For example, I was recently installing a video system in my church, and I was happy to find vendors to research and price out components. For me, that's exactly what advertising is about and how it's useful: Helping me find what I'm looking for, not convincing me that I need something I don't. This is, by the way, pretty much why I was happy to pay for Computer Shopper back in the day. Being advertised to can be *valuable* if you're in the market for something. Google seems to have figured this out.
Other than that, these days, I block most ads because they've become obnoxious, a malware vector, and an unnecessary intrusion into my privacy.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by acscott on Wednesday December 17 2014, @05:33PM
Think of web ads like commercials on TV with the added benefit you can click and buy.
(Score: 2) by joshuajon on Wednesday December 17 2014, @05:50PM
That's my thinking as well. I've never clicked a television, radio, or print ad and bought something either. For some reason those mediums never seem to garner as much scrutiny as web advertising.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday December 17 2014, @08:03PM
Think of web ads like commercials on TV with the added benefit you can click and buy.
Except that web ads are a lot less creative.
I've bought from clicking web ads. But only things I was looking for anyway.
Contrary to all the conspiracy theory anti-google stuff you read, I actually do benefit from my searches influencing the advertisements that I see. Was shopping Mini ITX motherboards the other day, and what few ads I see today are new sources.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by elf on Wednesday December 17 2014, @05:34PM
I suspect most ad's now are more about brand awareness rather than trusting people to click you. There are also more concentrated places to advertise that probably provide better returns
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 17 2014, @08:14PM
Firstly: advertising isn't about generating purchases (oddly enough).
Secondly: I have purchased many things as the result of advertising on the internet. My interests are eclectic, I don't watch cable, I don't listen to the radio, and I toss spam mail. As a byproduct, I am exposed to new products via the internet (and billboards/flyers). I would estimate that 50% of my non-essential purchases (food, internet, electricity, etc.) were/are the result of internet advertising. Approximately 90% of my purchases are internet-researched. A couple of recent examples are:
- bourbon
- high-end socks
- fencing shoes
- buffalo jerky
- scotch
- board game
Note that my household income is ~$165-180K, Dual-Income No Kids, my house is paid for, and my monthly expenses are around $1600, leaving around $10K/month for various expenses. I do kinda get the impression that the ads are targeted at me and my girl.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 17 2014, @08:40PM
- bourbon
- high-end socks
- fencing shoes
- buffalo jerky
- scotch
- board game
I wanna party with you!
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Wednesday December 17 2014, @04:32PM
Sad to see an icon go, but I did my mourning when the magazine disappeared and never really got into the web site. This sure proves content isn't king, because DDJ had some good content.
I think industry fragmentation killed DDJ in all its forms. In the mid 90s, you could pick up the magazine and get some interesting, stimulating articles even if it wasn't specific to technologies you worked with. But you can plot a graph of the rise of multiple languages and runtime systems and frameworks and so on in the 2000s with the decline of DDJ over the same period. The amount of knowledge a working programmer had to have to cope with the explosively-growing number of technologies in each niche (think of what a web developer needs to know to do J2EE programming, like presentation-layer HTML+CSS+JavaScript+jQuery, back-end JSP, JSTL, EL, an MVC framework, an ORM framework, DI, and maybe a custom business-specific object model) became overwhelming to keep up with, so it wasn't very relaxing to open a magazine (or web page) and read about some guy implementing a D-Flat library like it was in the 90s. As a working programmer, you don't have as much margin to explore things like you used to because your brain is so full.
Maybe I'm the exception, and other programmers can digest more information than I can, but if so DDJ wouldn't have folded, I don't think. DDJ was a generalist publication targeting a wide readership, and seems to have lost all of it.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday December 17 2014, @04:59PM
WRT generalist I can recommend their "developers DVD" which they release every couple years with perhaps every issue of every magazine the parent company ever published or purchased. So the same DVD has all the DrD and also has every issue of sysadmin magazine and every issue of the perl journal and some other magazines. So their ink on paper never went generalist but their DVD "multimedia" certainly did.
I remember some of their algo articles. A red black tree is a red black tree in any language, although the implementation is different. One problem with red black trees is if you need to learn about it, there's probably a really good perl journal article from the 90s thats still relevant today, its not like that data structure is changing much, BUT I'm more likely to pull up a wikipedia and/or someone's github and/or just use someone elses library rather than NIH making my own. I have a DD Developers DVD laying around somewhere but I end up using it for recreation and nostalgia more than "real work". Sometimes unconsciously something will embed from paging thru and I'll use it later.
I'd see it as encapsulation of complexity more than market fragmentation. Looking at the bad old days maybe joe average dev had to write his own hash function or his own data structure library so he was interested in algos. Now there's more total devs working, but they're all web monkeys so they don't write algos they just flesh out a framework for a crud app or what boils down to a web interface for some old existing sysadmin service.
People from a theory heavy background tend to (self select?) see algo knowledge as inherently good. And in the old days (I only go back to the 80s) I think theory was much more prevalent in the field. But good luck convincing Joe Average just trained up last year vocational CRUD webapp dev that knowing what a linked list is, or how it works, is remotely important to them or their work. And in all honesty they're probably correct, getting some experience in "fad of the month" javascript helper is probably more important for them and their job.
(Score: 2) by tadas on Wednesday December 17 2014, @05:10PM
Probably the last time DDJ had an article of real importance was when RMS unveiled the GPL in a 1985 issue (which I still have - I subscribed to it for the late '80s, together with Micro Cornucopia, which, presciently, stopped publishing in 1990).
The sense of community that the best magazines fostered in their heyday is now provided by blogs and sites like this one (and, for many years prior, the other guys [slashdot.org]).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday December 17 2014, @06:53PM
an article of real importance
Something I remember about 80s computer mags in general was getting introduced to completely off the wall new stuff.
Maybe the modern analogy of that is book series like the pragmatic "seven in seven" series which I find entertaining to read.
Here let me pick something weird that many people don't know about today. The urbit project. Nock the virtual machine, Hoon the functional language, and Arvo that kinda-operating system kinda-distributed filesystem sorta. Its really weird and interesting and strikes me as the kind of thing I'd have seen in a 80s computer mag. Lets see where its most likely to show up in 2015. My guess is web forums like this will win.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday December 17 2014, @06:19PM
DDJ edited out a lot of background info, to save precious space. If you didn't know the background, you would get lost. How to get up to speed so you could really understand an article? Search the Internet! Heck, often didn't need to go that far, just look things up on Wikipedia which I've always found good for basic technical info. You could dig up the info you needed, links to more details on anything you weren't familiar with, as well as most of what was in the article. At which point you're asking yourself, what do you need the dead tree format for?
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday December 17 2014, @07:42PM
This is because in the last 18 months, there has been a marked shift in how vendors value website advertising. They've come to realize that website ads tend to be less effective than they once were.
We are seeing this more and more, not only the demise of printed media, but also the demise of content that was free based on advertising.
Google's Idea [thesilentpartnermarketing.com] of ad free web sites based on subscriptions probably isn't the model that will survive, but nevertheless a change is coming to.
An entirely new (and very disruptive) business model based on some form of subscriptions is likely going to have to emerge.
Either that or all sites end up being funded out of pocket like SoylentNews, but with less content. Which reminds me, I'm going to make another trip through pay pal today because that funding bar on the SN front page hasn't moved much at all.
/fires up paypal....Done. Heck I even thought of giving gewg_ a gift subscription, but that would mean he'd have to log in.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday December 17 2014, @10:06PM
You mean that stackoverflow sites are about to go?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Appalbarry on Thursday December 18 2014, @04:02AM
Sniff. Wipe tiny tear from eye. Some things really can't be replaced by a web search.