| Title | End of the Road for Dr Dobbs | |
| Date | Wednesday December 17 2014, @03:19PM | |
| Author | janrinok | |
| Topic | ||
| from the end-of-an-era dept. | ||
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.
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printed from SoylentNews, End of the Road for Dr Dobbs on 2024-04-19 21:08:18