[Morphling]

>Dr. Dobb's, we had close to $3 million in revenue, almost all of it from advertising

Is that actual quote from the site? Since now it just says: "Dr. Dobb's, we had healthy profits and revenue, almost all of it from advertising"

I'm just curious how they would manage to spend $3 MILLION in 4 years and how it wouldn't be profitable to run a website that was ONLY $1 million revenue.

I've never even heard of the site until now, so I have no idea what they are doing, but it really seems odd that money was an issue if you are raking in millions.

[B-Con]

It's mostly before my time, but they used to be a prominent tech journal, started in the late 70s and were fairly popular in the 90s.

In my head I picture them as a small company, not just "some website". $1m in revenue doesn't make for a very large company. I'm curious how they morphed in size over time and what their expenses were.

[Morphling]

As I said I have no idea what they did and maybe I'm just being naive, but $1 million per year seems like plenty to keep a website online.

[dagw]

$1 million per year is plenty to just keep a website online. It's not that much if you also want to pay people a decent wage to produce world class content to put on the site.

I'm guessing the choices they faced was between a slow multi-year slide along:

cut costs->lower quality content->less viewers->less money->cut costs...

and simply seeing the writing on the wall and calling it quits before they hit rock bottom. I guess a third option would be to take The New Republic route and throw out everything the current audience loved about the magazine and try to create a new, entirely different product, with the same name but focusing a potentially more profitable market. But I respecting for not wanting to go that route either.

[andrewbinstock]

Rather than repeat the same information, see my response to this question asked earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8759328

[Morphling]

That still doesn't answer how to managed to spend $4 million a year