⇥ Some thoughts on the php|architect relaunch

It’s been a week since we “rebooted” the php|architect brand—time for some thoughts, lessons learned and selected statistics.

First of all, the reason why we did this. Many people have written me personally wondering what madness possessed me to authorize a price drop of over 50%, and moving to a colour-only, print & PDF format—some actually questioning my motives, as if the changes were really the result of an alliance with some sinister external corporate force that is silently taking over our company.

Reality is always much duller than fiction
From a certain point of view, during a period of questionable, government-sponsored bailouts that appear to reward incompetence and crime, I can see how people would welcome the news with suspicion. After all, when a box of pasta has doubled in price over the last six months, any price reduction looks strange at best.

Alas, there is no devil in the details. We decided that it was time for php|architect to reflect the market which it attempts to cater to—and the PHP market has changed dramatically since we introduced the magazine six years ago (that’s right, ladies and gents—six years ago).

When we launched php|a, I honestly had no idea that it would become the success it is today. We started because we, as developers, were unhappy with the content that was available, and needed a better source of knowledge—we never expected it to generate any significant revenue, let alone spawn the series of products that have come out of our labs over the years.

Meanwhile, the increased cost of producing the content of the magazine has been more than offset by a growing number of subscribers, and the price at which we were selling it was no longer reflective of the market we were reaching. $80 a year translate into a nice revenue stream, but that very revenue was making us drift from our mission of providing knowledge to the PHP world in a reasonable way.

Is the price right?
Thus, we decided that php|a needed a new image and a new price. Next, came the decision of what to do with our current subscribers. Technically speaking, we were under no obligation to do anything other than continue their subscriptions for the remaining number of issues at the old price. Or, we could extend their subscriptions in recognition of the fact that the price had changed so dramatically. We thought about it for about 1.539 seconds and decided to go with option B—any which way you look at it, it just makes sense. First of all, it’s the right thing to do. Second, from a business perspective I doubt that customers would have been very happy with us if we had done nothing. Third, from a financial perspective the cost of handing out 30,000 free issues is amortized over time, and will be offset by the advantages of having more long-term subscribers.

The decision of going to an all-print format was much more agonizing. In the end, we considered that a larger number of print subscribers would afford us the opportunity of amortizing certain costs among a larger pool of customers, while providing us access to products, like colour printing, that were simply not available before.

To print, or not to print
A number of people have written us with concerns (“concerns” being, in some case, a mild euphemism for death threats) about the environmental impact of this decision, which is something that we did, of course, take into consideration. Although we did mention, in our press release announcing the new php|architect, that the changes would essentially be carbon-neutral, that statement just didn’t seem to compute all that well, so I thought I’d pass along a slightly expanded explanation here.

The print industry works in very strange ways. Despite the fact that immense strides have been made in the technology behind printing, the actual production of printed materials relies on processes that haven’t really changed in many years—aided in part by the fact that the capital costs involved in running a printing operation are enormous.

Many people I talk to seem to think that magazines are produced the same way we go about printing pages in our day-to-day lives—print the page one by one, collate them, and ship them out to the customers. They imagine bigger printers, but essentially expect the process to be the same.

Sadly, that’s not the way things work. Large-scale printers have a number of quirks that are not immediately evident to the uninitiated individual (as we ourselves found out the hard way when we started printing php|a). For example, lighter paper weights are only available on large web presses, which, in turn, are only economical over a certain number of copies due to the significant start-up costs caused by capital amortization, mounting the plates, inking them, and testing ink distribution. Similarly, environmentally-conscious products like acid-free paper and soy-based inks are only financially feasible at larger quantities just because of the way they are priced.

Thus, printing, say, 10,000 copies of a magazine in colour can cost barely 20% more than printing 5,000, but result in a final product that is lighter—and therefore has a much lower transportation carbon footprint—and is made with materials that are much better from an environmental perspective.

So, what did we learn?
By and large, we found that our customers have liked the changes we introduced, resulting in a jump of almost 20% in subscriptions in just over a week. It is still too early to tell whether the trend will keep up, but so far I am very happy with the results.

One important lesson that I learned from this process is the significance of change. Despite the occasional complaint, the general message that I got back from our readership has been a collective sigh of relief, almost as if they were trying to tell us “about time!”. Well, there are more (big) changes coming, so I look forward to more and more occasional audible breaths from our audience in the near future.