Macworld Magazine Shuts Down

There aren’t many computer magazines left in print, and so it wasn’t entirely a surprise that Macworld shut down on Wednesday (though the web site will carry on). The timing was ironic, coming just after a major product announcement from Apple and just before the biggest product release in the company’s history, but the Apple calendar also said that there probably wouldn’t be an equally big event for a magazine to cover until this time next year. Affiliated publication PC World stopped printing last year. Magazines in general continue to decline, but aren’t about to go away. The decline in circulation among major print magazines is about 1 percent per year and the decline in advertising pages, not too much faster, around 2 percent per year. There are still around 85 magazines with U.S. circulation over 1 million copies. As far as I can tell, Macworld’s circulation never quite reached that level in its 30 year history, though for a few years it came close.