Award-Winning Nautilus Enters Rough Waters
One of the problems is that they're shipping dead trees. No way is this economically sustainable these days. They should have gone all digital and raised their prices long ago.<p>Let's do some math - how many subscribers do they need to break even if they pare down staff, go all digital, and raise their price a bit? Hand-wavy numbers for minimal viable staffing, but should be order of magnitude correct:<p><pre><code>  $ 600,000 Freelancers, $5K per article, 20 articles/issue, 6 issues/year
  $ 200,000 2 editorial
  $ 100,000 1 marketing person, online marketing savvy
  $ 100,000 2 support staff (clerical, PA, etc)
  $ 200,000 2 management/fundraising/operations staff
  $ 100,000 1 webmaster/IT person
  $ 100,000 outsourced services (HR, payroll, website hosting, etc)
</code></pre>
$1,400,000 annual burn rate assuming a minimal staff to run just the online magazine and dump print (I acknowledge they have other expenses, but let's ignore them for now)<p>If you charge $60 for an annual subscription - very reasonable for the content - they would need 23333.33 subscribers to break even.<p>They got $1.2 million last year in grants, some $9.5 million in funding since 2012. If they can't manage to attract 24K subscribers with that kind of funding they don't deserve to stay in business no matter how good their content is.<p>I love their content, but they need somebody who knows how to run a business to be in charge.