It’s not a good time to be a print magazine right now. Even a crowdsourced magazine with a stripped-down staff that relies on the contributions of its more talented readers. JPG Magazine and its parent company 8020 Media is shutting down after running out of money and not being able to find any new investors. The seed investment had come from Cnet founder Halsey Minor, who apparently also did not want to put in any more.
JPG was an attempt to create a photography magazine that relied on its readers for its content and included them in the editing process. Nearly 200,000 photographers have submitted photographs for consideration to JPG, many of them via Flickr. The site itself was able to attract about 300,000 unique U.S. viewers a month (Quantcast), but its business model relied on selling print ads. And that’s a business you don’t want to be in right now, especially if you are a startup with an artsy photo mag that was never very appealing to advertisers.
But it was a worthy experiment nonetheless. 8020 Media was founded upon the belief that a print magazine publisher could be viable if it stripped out most of the costs and created a community of readers to help in its production. Perhaps the flaw was in sticking to a print magazine as its final product. In reality, the print magazine was nothing but an artifact of the Website and the community that created it. The value of JPG was in the online portion—the process by which the best photographs were commissioned, curated, and selected with the help of other reader-photographers. It is a model that I believe we will see more of in the future because talent is everywhere. We just need a better way of finding and highlighting the very best of it.
You can download back issues in PDF form before the site goes down on Monday.
it’s unfortunate that JPG mag had to fold, I only recently discovered it when I started to be seriously interested in photography in late 2007
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Yea, JPG was a great resource for photographers.
Many more print publications will fold. The internet is a much more efficient timely way of delivering any type of content.
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You’re next to fold, fat man.
looking at comparatively trivial ideas that get tons of funding jpgmags’ unsuccessful end is almost a cultural shame.
What is or what was JPG Magazine?
Never heard of it before until just now…!
Serves them right for kicking out the founders.
I remember reading about that…. there was some drama that techcrunch covered…. they should have referenced that in the post….
It’s a shame – I’d be interested to know how many staffers they had, and why they decided to shut rather than perhaps going online only.
After all, 300,000 monthly uniques is a reasonable base – and I’ve edited online mags with a really small volunteer team that still produced work of good quality – the biggest stumbling block was finding someone to volunteer to monetise it without funding upfront.
Agree; that was my first thought as well. Why not just go online only? It seems like they could sell the online assets to someone that wanted to make a go of it pretty easily and then the site would survive as a social network supported by online advertising. Such a shame.
it’s a shame they are folding. as a member i found a lot of inspiration in the assignments and pictures of other photographers.
the print format, in my opinion, isn’t dead but needs to re-tool itself into an on-demand medium. i wonder if JPG would have survived had they built their monthly magazines to be printed out only when it was requested; sort of a JIT thing? you see an issue you like, pay a fee and JPG prints it out and sends the copy to you.
but i agree with thomas, with all the crap sites that get funding it’s a shame nobody had the vision to step up and help a site such as JPG add a little more culture to the online world.
Yes, this is quite sad.
Great idea, but better for an online format than a print format, for many reasons (the print ad reliance for income only being the main one).
Nice idea, a crowd sourced mag – I thought the biz model was in selling the mag to the user/submitter base? Now that’s an interesting model – ad funded ain’t going to work.
I agree with you Mike that we’ll see much more of this type of venture, because you can’t take your Macbook Pro to the toilet very easily and nothing replaces the aesthetic (if not content) appeal of magazines.
Less glossy, arty, more down and dirty best of the web, now that’s more like it.
Sorry, I meant Erick not Mike!
Sweet justice. JPG was founded by the talented Derek Powezek and Heather Champ. They were forced out by unscrupulous means.
Here’s the story:
http://powazek.com/posts/534
That’s just one side of the story. And, it doesn’t seem very accurate based on what I saw and know.
I know Derek, I believe him. Either way, it was a success, they left, it folded.
Wow, that really sucks. According to that article, this thing was that guy’s brain child.
However, he seems like a pretty intelligent and capable guy. I really hope he is able to shake this off, learn from his mistakes, and keep doing what he loves, because he has done great things so far.
Seem to me that there is better future for fashion in video than in print. Style.com (Vouge), Elle.com, CHIC.TV, and such are doing well with their online fashion videos.
The last post says it all. Halsey Minor is as unscrupulous as they come. He finds talent and offers the talent a reasonable deal to buy in and then fires the talent and says sue me. This guy is a not to be trusted. He seems to do this to everyone including Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Banks and people relying on pay checks. Hope his boat sinks faster than the Titanic.
Seems like there is nothing wrong with the model. The execution seems poor.
This isn’t a revenue model problem, it’s a content delivery model problem. They obviously have an enthusiastic community behind them on the web site. So, why not change it to a community based web site with an on-demand book product instead of a magazine?
This would provide a continuous revenue stream, plus provide an additional revenue stream through an art book.
If someone wants the print version, they can buy it, in a hard cover “art” book format.
It just makes no sense that they would just cease operations all together. Unless they neglected it for too long… which they probably did.
I totally agree with you Troy. They would bring in very large amounts of income if they had some membership community portal. that would attract many photographers and readers too. Plus advertisers are more eager to pay for online ads than for printed ones… Anyway it is really sad seeing JPG mag going down…
Too bad it couldn’t make it to 2009.
JPG Magazine caught my eyes way back in 2005 when they started out as a print-as-you-order Lulu.com customer. The founders of this magazine obviously have talent, as you can see from the photos they selected. Yet, back then I thought the “back to the dead trees” model won’t work.
The beauty of Internet is that there is an “avalanche” of images, still and moving, on sites like Flickr and YouTube now. Yes, many of them look amateurish, but the creators never meant to make them look “professional”. JPG Magazine makes photos that are snapped with $99 cameras look slick, and the photographers get a kick out of seeing their pictures end up in a glossy magazine.
The business idea of JPG Magazine is grand (and radical), but is unworkable in this digital age. It is as smart as telling the more popular YouTube video creators: “Hey, guys, let me help you produce DVD copies of your videos and sell them to the world. You will be rich!”
“Hey, guys, let me help you produce DVD copies of your videos and sell them to the world. You will be rich!”
Not really the same at all. YouTube videos, by defintition, aren’t DVD quality. They also aren’t curated with production value as a factor. JPG specifically showcased images that were print ready and print worthy. IMHO, JPG worked best while at Lulu.
For one, you only print what you sell and once you start trying to support yourself with ads, your editiorial policy is no longer your own.
“YouTube videos, by defintition, aren’t DVD quality.”
Clearly you haven’t visited YouTube lately. They do have an HD channel now, and the producers for that channel will disagree with your statement.
@fighting words Some of the videos are better quality, but “popular” on YouTube is not the same as JPGs curated consensus.
JPG also never said “give us your photos, we’ll make you rich”. They paid $100 per photo. If you had said “Hey popular YouTube video maker on the HD channel, we’ll give you a $100 to use your video on a compilation DVD” it would be more fair.
Your original point was the “back to the dead trees model” is, well… dead. Amazon did pretty well this XMas, IIRC, but you seem to think DVDs are dead, too? It’s a specious point.
“Clearly you haven’t visited YouTube lately. They do have an HD channel now, and the producers for that channel will disagree with your statement.”
Yes, there is some hd content. 99% of the rest of youtube is sd and poor quality.
Even still that argument doesn’t matter since they were not just doing basic prints of the photos. They were collecting them and showcasing them in a quality design format.
This biz model is definitely not dead. Someone could do something similar for a niche market like cars. There may only be a handful of good car blogs, but there are hundreds of car forums with thousands of active members that participate almost everyday on the forum.
JPG Magazine is a fine print product I wouldn’t mind putting on my coffee table, but the unfortunate reality is that the publication is a goner now. To argue over whether it died because of the bad economy or unworkable business model is all academic, unless the talented founding couple of this magazine could start it up again after the economony improves, and continue with the “dead-tree” model and be successful and prove me wrong.
In the age of Flickr and YouTube, we are compelled to view digital art in a different light. The days when photographs of Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Ansel Adams could fetch top dollars are probably the thing of the past, thanks to the “brutal” reality that high-pixel photographs are readily available on the Internet.
The tactile feel of a well-designed paper publication in our hands is precious, which I do treasure, but we are in a different world now.
By the way, Amazon might tell you that it is successful because it has broadened its product line, and I doubt the book division is the most lucrative revenue generator.
Woa… this sucks
JPG mag was a great source of inspiration
good luck to the team in their next endeavor
Sad news indeed. We (Independent Photography Network ipnstock.com) had talked to them about how to work together. I thought the model was brilliant yet in the end expenses have to be paid by someone and I can tell you that advertisers are pulling back like crazy these day. Many have frozen spending for 3-6 months. Don’t fault the founders or the model just yet. It’s most likely the well ran dry.
I’m not sure I’d write off the model just because JPG went under. They’re internal fights were well known and whatever the truth(s) community and the free labor it provides breaks down when the trust’s not there. I wonder too about the mix. Where was their focus and money spent: what percentage was web vs print? What time was staff vs volunteers? An all-volunteer model that focused its time on the web and did a simple on-demand print version that mostly paid for itself (charging purchasers actual print cost) might still work. A few years ago I made up a best-of-my-blog book on Cafepress. It only took a few hours to cut and paste and upload. The price was high but not unreasonable and it sold enough to make the afternoon’s work worthwhile. I realize art magazines have different standards but surely something interesting could be done with minimal editing as long as the content was free and pre-selected.
Someone could start up an online version of this concept. If the Christian Science Monitor left print and is now going online I think any print media would have to at least consider it.
Very unfortunate indeed. Classy mag with great design. Here’s to hoping they can salvage their website.
I’ve been inviting the JPG members to come join our themed photo sharing site at 52clix.com . We don’t have a print edition, but we foster the same spirit and principles that JPG members loved – encouragement, openness and inspiration – in a Web-only format.
Producing a print magazine isn’t entirely out of the question either, we just need to find a way that the numbers work out, particularly in this economy.
I like the idea of this for an adult magazine but where the users pay to become editors to review the content. Might give it a try, any more details on this jpg’s methods?
Sorry to hear that. I believe they would have done much better with a web only channel.
Derek Powazek, JPG co-founder, is working on a new Print-in-demand concept for magazines: http://twitter....atus/1092146188
New startup website: magcloud.com
Too bad they didn’t make it, but seriously, why go with a print edition? Their submittals came online. Who did the market study that said a) people wanted the hard copy mag, and b) advertisers would pay for placement?
I don’t think it worked, but for none of the reasons here. It’s sad of course, but something that is actually really great is not going to die. That is just the way it is. It was really flawed in ways that aren’t apparent yet to most people. I never thought is was anything more than a nice idea. But it never changed anything. It just didn’t. It was a great try at something, but it was too dependent on older magazines somehow… I don’t know how to explain it. But I really don’t see how it could be such a fantastic idea and fail. Me personally, I would love to see a collectable cool photography magazine… but JPG was not it for me ever. I hate saying that, but it never grabbed me. I really felt like something was missing.
I don’t understand where all the costs are in this company. Tech infrastructure is there, user generated content is cheap and bandwidth is almost free now.
Who was getting the fat paycheck, and why won’t they take the pay cuts to make this work?
One of my frustrations with the valley is the foolish assumption that big money leads to big things. More than not it simply leads to payroll burdens that cripple these “too big for their britches” startups.
whoops, my bad. I didn’t realize they were printing stuff. There goes the bankroll right there.
Everybody canceled their subscriptions more than a year ago, when the founders were pushed out:
http://www.meta...of-JPG-Magazine
While that may or may not be true, if there is data supporting that, it would be fascinating to check out….
The beauty of JPG was letting amateur photographers see their work in print. Print still remains the bar for workmanship in some industries…
In their own words (JPGmag issue 7, page 5) “We say, if magazines are dying, it’s their own damn fault”
This is for those of you who want to be in a community to learn, share and be inspired (rather than for being published): a friend of mine invited me to a photography network which currently is in closed beta, but I can also sent invites to a limited number of people. They offer most of the features we have on JPG (minus print, of course) and some interesting equipment related stuff. From what I could see, it’s not so artsy but rather for the technically oriented. If you’re interested, just drop me a mail to trevorwardin-at-yahoo.com
It’s really too bad when something this inspirational disappears into oblivion. Yes, the business model may be slightly off, but JPG Magazine had obviously developed an avid community, which all disappears in a puff of smoke in a few days.
Does anyone know of any decent alternatives to let amateur photographers get exposure for their work in such a unique way?
I think they got the 80/20 idea the other way around. 80% internet users contributions for 20% offline readers, instead of 20% internet users for 80% offline readers.
Although it’s unfortunate that another magazine has hit the skids, I was never that impressed with much of the imagery in this magazine. It seemed like it was a bunch of back-slapping egos trying to give false praise. Some of the imagery was good, but it seemed, to me, that the fundamentals of good photography were sadly lacking. That’s what good editors are for-to separate the wheat from the chaff…