Repetitive content

The lack of updates recently is primarily brought about by my need to spend time sorting through the clutter in my apartment in preparation for my move. As expected, there has been a lot of unnecessary clutter (probably more than I would have liked). Among the things I've found have been a variety of old cycling magazines from various points in my cycling life. There were a number of copies of Bicycling Australia, a huge number of Australian Cyclist magazines, and a few others. The one thing they all had in common was the sheer number of articles that seem to be "repeated" periodically.

Some of them were "training" articles, some of them were "advocacy" articles, some of them were "race previews", and a slightly eclectic collection of "editorials". However, as I was sorting through them, I often had to check the date on the front cover of the magazine to make sure I wasn't actually reading the same magazine I'd just finished looking at. Such was the similarity of many of the "stories". I suppose the editors of the respective magazines will justify their repetitive stories by pointing out that there is generally a subscriber "life cycle" to these magazines, and that the average subscriber will probably rescind their subscription after two years and move on to something else, having already acquired their "how to" knowledge from experience.

That being the case, one wonders why these people don't just put their information on a webpage somewhere and save the trees (not to mention the printing costs). After all, they could still run their advertising on the website (which would seem to be their main source of revenue, given the sheer number of ads in the magazines). So why do we have these articles being "recycled" every so often, on to paper which costs the publisher money to print on, and which the reader is probably only going to throw out eventually? The answer would seem to be that people tend to pay more credence to information if they have to pay $7.95 for it, than if it was free -- even if it is the same information they paid $7.95 for six months ago. Throw in a subscription, and the information now costs $3.95 per issue, which suddenly seems like a "great deal", but is, in fact, still considerably more expensive than simply looking up the information on a website.

Then of course, in two years' time, there are a whole new "generation" of subscribers to take up the "great offer", and the process begins all over again.