Hobby publishing has evolved into what I am going to call "The traditional model". In this traditional model, a printed (or digitally distributed analog like a PDF version) periodical is the primary "product" of the organization. It is this product that customers (subscribers & members) are paying for. It is also this product that drives significant amounts of a publisher's costs through the need to assemble, physically print and mail the periodical.

We have arrived at this model because it, historically, has been the logical option. The hobby publishing industry began in the first half of the 20th century when this model was the only logical one to service a "community of interest". This was because mass market periodical publishing was the only avenue available to share news and information with an audience.

Periodicals were, by their very nature, periodic, because of the requirements of the medium: magazines needed to be written, laid out, printed and shipped. In a purely physical publishing world, it would've made no sense to mail all interested subscribers a letter every day with the very latest happenings or with information they would find interesting. In the modern world of digital communications, not only is this type of regular communication possible, but it's also the primary way that people consume information.

The hobby publishing industry has served its community well through the years. It created products that its customers were familiar with and wanted. It is currently struggling because of the changing patterns of what its customers want.

When designing a product of any fashion, it is important to make it something that customers consciously want, but also something that works with how they experience the world. SmartPhones are an excellent example of this. They have become pervasive in the world while previous generations of digital organizers or mobile computing devices struggled with adoption. SmartPhones "play along with" the way people operate in the world and how they interact with the products. People were used to telephones and then mobile phones came along. Mobile phones were a single conceptual jump for people: they were phones that worked anywhere. SmartPhones, similarly, were a single jump: they were mobile phones that you could effectively do other stuff on, be it play Candy Crush, doom scroll on Facebook, or take photos.

The way that people consume information has changed and the industry needs to adapt to it or perish.

This change started with cable news and the creation of the 24 hour news cycle. This broke the idea of periodical news, even that which was delivered by the "evening news" programs. Now, information was being fed to people constantly. This translated easily to the internet. News websites do not post their stories only in the morning when a periodical would typically be printed and distributed, they post them constantly as they happen. People consume these stories by visiting those sites or, increasingly, through various other distribution channels (specifically social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram) or content hosts and aggregators like Youtube. The quality of the outcomes of these models is debatable, but their prevalence is not.

In many ways, the Adult Entertainment Industry is a fantastic case study in the evolution of media. While the subject may feel taboo, it is an innovative industry that struggles with many of the problems that other more "mainstream" publishers face and has historically been a quiet driver of innovation and consumer preference. For example, many people posit that the real reason VHS beat BetaMax in the videotape format wars was not because of any technical superiority, but because Sony, who created BetaMax would not license the technology to adult video producers, while VHS had no such restriction. It is also not a huge leap to believe that the availability of adult content on the internet also helped drive things like broadband internet adoption and the rise of mobile computing and SmartPhones. The adult entertainment industry faced similar struggles to the hobby publishing industry, and has many interesting parallels that deserve the attention of hobby publishers.

Adult entertainment was initially distributed via printed magazines. We know the names: Playboy, Hustler, Juggs, etc… Magazines were the easiest way for people to get their hands on and consume the content. This changed with the coming of the internet. The change was reflected in the declining relevance and prosperity of those magazines as their customers shifted their consumption patterns to professionally (largely) published and maintained websites that would monetize their content via subscriptions. As time has progressed, however, even those sites have come to struggle as the business model shifted from a "top down" one to one that was more "platform centric" where many individual contributors were able to create monetizable content and share it via platforms like PornHub and Onlyfans. This has changed that entire business.

Playboy, at its peak, had 5.7 million subscribers and has only 700,000 today. Meanwhile, Onlyfans has 170 million registered users and over 1.5 million content creators. The modern platform has twice the number of content creators as the legacy platform has subscribers.

There are many reasons for this, but there are two key characteristics: these modern platforms are aligned with the way that content consumers want to access and consume the content, and they make the production and publishing of that content easy. The legacy content platforms and producers did not adapt to this future and they are dying.

This is the same pattern that exists in the hobby publishing industry. It is a declining industry providing a product with decreasing demand to a dwindling segment of a still large audience.

There is, indeed, a large audience for hobby content. While many may claim that "the hobby is dying", these people are mistaken. A more accurate statement is that "the hobby as I know it is changing". This is the case now and has been the case for as long as the industry has existed. The difference is that, now, these changes are threatening the viability of the industry itself.

Past changes, like the introduction of mass market injection molded plastic model kits, widely available highly detailed ready to run locomotives, and even the rise of the internet itself, have helped grow the industry.

Lowering the hobby's barrier to entry, by requiring fewer skills to participate in it, grew its potential market. The wide availability of these models increased the potential advertising revenue in the industry.

These were positive changes for the industry: there were more companies and products to advertise and there were more ways that these products could be used to be documented and shared. There was a growing interest in specific railroads that helped spawn and grow Historical Societies. This all grew the number of column inches able to be devoted to both advertising and content and allowed the industry to thrive.

The growing consumer shift away from periodical consumption has had the opposite effect on the industry. The growth of online content creation, distribution and sales and marketing channels for advertisers has led to shrinking readers and advertisers while the hobby itself remains strong and growing.

It is resolving this delta by adopting new business models that align with modern consumer behaviors that is the chief challenge of the industry today.

Past and current efforts to achieve this transformation have not been successful because they do not adequately embrace the shift in consumer trends and instead attempt to force a legacy business model onto consumers who desire modern products. Examples of these include releasing back catalogs of content that quickly become inaccessible for their purchasers, the development and release of "walled garden" apps to access publisher content, and the production and release of paid video content that requires consumers to consume the content on a limited set of platforms (like web browsers).