Out of Date Information & Articles on Website

I was looking around the Model Engineer website to see if there were any events listed in the near future. I was a little dissapointed as the most up to date event was for July 2017! Prompted by this failure in timeliness I looked at other parts of the Model Engineer website and found by menu item:

• Home - The latest issue of Model Engineer contains an article about Halloween and running in the dark.
• Features, Exhibitions - MEX 2014
• Features, Visits - Hunslett in 2010 by David Clark is the most recent
• Workshop, Setting Up a Workshop - A Health & Safety Article from 2014
• Workshop, Machines - Belt Drive for an X3 mill in 2015
• Workshop, Processes - Drill Performance Tables Jan 2017
• Workshop, Supplier Visits - Pennyfarthing Tools be Davis Clark 2010
• Events - Only 2 entries most recent being July 2017, The ME pdf link appears to be for 2017

I know that it is difficult to keep things up to date but there seems to be a bit of a failing here. Does MyTimeMedia have a full time website editor? If they don't they would seem to need one. And as an aside no mention of the next Model Engineer Exhibition!

John

Web editor is Diane who has been of sick for about 4 or5 months so November would have been about the last time she was working which ties in with Halloween. Stand in Editor Martin probably does not have access level high enough to alter home page etc. Majority of MTM staff are not full time employees.

Quite a few of those headings were set up by previous Editor David Clarke and he only used them a bit to start with and soon lost interest.

Edited By JasonB on 28/02/2018 12:07:46

No they don't. Do you really think this website makes enough money to pay for a full time editor? It's a small, very special interest hobby website run by a magazine publishing company with dozens or hundreds of similar narrow-focus special interest hobby magazines. Employing a fulltime editor for each magazine is not even possible in today's publishing climate, let alone a fulltime editor for each website.

The website is free and we get more than what we pay for.

Ah, didn't realise Diane was also the web editor. I wish her a speedy and full recovery.

John

I would actually dispute that. A website is surely these days a primary means of advertising and a source of income. A properly designiged and updated website will generate income from advertising and of course encourage people to purchase magazines or on-line subscriptions. MTM most definitely do not provide the website out of the kindness of their hearts! Also I would of thought that as MTM has many websites a full time editor/web designer would not be out of the question. Failure to provide a good on-line experience these days is a recipe for failure, look no further than Maplin in another recent thread.

John

Yes, websites are a source of income, but not very much. Pennies per hundred clicks. Most of the money is still in print advertising. Look at all the newspapers and magazines that have gone out of business in the past decade, and they are legion. Every one of them had a website. Once they lost their print advertising revenue, game over.

The magazines and newspapers with good websites are the ones that are making enough money from their print product to finance their web presence. Ten years ago they were all talking about how they were going to become big players on the web and that was their future. Never happened.

And now, Google and Facebook are getting 85 per cent of all new online advertising spend, due to their personalized targeted ad strategies etc. So its only a matter of time before 85 per cent of all online revenue goes to those two giants. The future of other websites as a revenue source is not looking much better than what newspapers and magazines have seen in the past decade.

Edited By Hopper on 28/02/2018 12:50:17

We don't make a lot of money out of the website.

This is pretty ironic if you were to see the web usage stats both in absolute rank and and compared to other model engineering sites.

I try to make sure I put up at least one piece of new content to coincide with each issue of MEW; the problem is that the classifications are a bit vague and most of the articles I put up go under the same heading.

I also aim my contributions budget at the magazine rather than the website, although in 267 I will have a short but interesting article that will have both printed and online elements.

Anyone interested in writing web articles can contact me. I can't pay as much as for magazine articles, but they will typically be shorter and with fewer images.

Neil

Just out of curiosity, does anybody have any idea how Diane is going on ?

Roy

Edited By roy entwistle on 28/02/2018 21:47:53

Ditto from me as well.

Geoff - Going through a bad patch as well.