• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Giving Up On FT

I wish we could reach younger readers, but I wonder if they are even out there. Dennis don't do anything to market the mag to readers of any age, let alone those elusive kids.
Maybe the young have slightly different paranormal tastes. Conspiracy theory has gone mainstream, and you do give it a lot of coverage which is good. True spooky story podcasts are popular - what if the IHTM section were expanded?
 
... I wish we could reach younger readers, but I wonder if they are even out there. Dennis don't do anything to market the mag to readers of any age, let alone those elusive kids.

They're out there, but ... Their reading habits are increasingly geared for smaller chunks in an electronic format. In effect, you're still trying to sell 'em big chunks in a hardcopy format. That's the key mismatch.

You seek to both (a) expand your paying audience and (b) market the magazine generally. Here's what I suspect to be a potentially effective strategy ...

FT has a large corpus of interesting and informative articles geared for the layperson. Your older material is currently dead weight, insofar as Dennis doesn't re-market it in any form. Leverage this resource toward accomplishing objectives (a) and (b) above.

Convert selected older articles into freestanding chunks suitable for mobile / Kindle (etc.) reading and make them available online for a modest purchase or subscription cost (e.g., $1.00 apiece for downloadable files; a cheap subscription to a growing library of old articles).

This is the sort of marketing motif most likely to attract and engage the younger crowd. If they like what they see, these recycled tidbits will serve as the bait to draw in new subscribers to the mag. In the meantime, the revenue will at least help offset the cost of trying this approach.
 
They're out there, but ... Their reading habits are increasingly geared for smaller chunks in an electronic format. In effect, you're still trying to sell 'em big chunks in a hardcopy format. That's the key mismatch.

You seek to both (a) expand your paying audience and (b) market the magazine generally. Here's what I suspect to be a potentially effective strategy ...

FT has a large corpus of interesting and informative articles geared for the layperson. Your older material is currently dead weight, insofar as Dennis doesn't re-market it in any form. Leverage this resource toward accomplishing objectives (a) and (b) above.

Convert selected older articles into freestanding chunks suitable for mobile / Kindle (etc.) reading and make them available online for a modest purchase or subscription cost (e.g., $1.00 apiece for downloadable files; a cheap subscription to a growing library of old articles).

This is the sort of marketing motif most likely to attract and engage the younger crowd. If they like what they see, these recycled tidbits will serve as the bait to draw in new subscribers to the mag. In the meantime, the revenue will at least help offset the cost of trying this approach.

An app that gives the user a free daily Fortean gobbet plus paid access to a wider archive.
 
An app that gives the user a free daily Fortean gobbet plus paid access to a wider archive.

Yep ... There are all sorts of front end / market side variations that might be employed.
 
Maybe the young have slightly different paranormal tastes. Conspiracy theory has gone mainstream, and you do give it a lot of coverage which is good. True spooky story podcasts are popular - what if the IHTM section were expanded?

An official FT podcast, if there are resources for it, might be worth a try.
 
I’m not entirely sure that the next generation are discerning enough to appreciate Forteana.


One in three primary school pupils believe that Sir Winston Churchill was the first man to walk on the moon, according to a survey.
...Two in five of those questioned think Mars is just a chocolate bar, while a third believe Earth is not an official planet.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1582254/Winston-Churchill-walked-on-moon-say-pupils.html


There'd be little point in arguing about direction of shadows in this scenario and if you mention Tintin, it’s Greta.
 
Maybe the FT needs to do a side project along the lines of a part work... like the Unexplained.
Science behind Stranger Things, Harry Potter v The Catholic Church.
Why Zombies can’t exist but the Monster under your bed is real...

A limited edition series of mags... with Nails From The True Cross as a giveaway as well as a test free edition on digital media, but without the nails but with a 3D print plan for the Baldy Crowley Dildo which may hit some form of demographic target in line with the FT’s current marketing strategy.
Otherwise, we’re going to be looking at Nazi Blackface Morris Dancing Barge Commanders as an article to comment on.
 
It was awful to sink the web page. As I noted in an earlier post, the youth don't read from paper. It's a given that your audience will be old if you market this way (see also US skeptical orgs who are old and out of touch).

We had a huge response to covering Fortean stories on DoubtfulNews.com - there was simply too much for one person to do.

It is an investment to launch and maintain social media sites but it would certainly work.

I hate to sound like a broken record but live events in the US are BOOMING. Many Fortean topics are covered by people who know little about what they are talking about and are making a nice chunk of change on it. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of paracelebrities talking about this stuff.
 
An official FT podcast, if there are resources for it, might be worth a try.
Sadly if they're aren't resources to keep a website up, I doubt there will be enough for a podcast.
 
You've got to market to them via the channels they use - Snapchat, Instagram, whatever else is out there now. Twitter and FB are old skool nowadays.

I guess they might have an ironic resurgence but I can't see it. "Facebook? My mum uses Facebook."
I am early 30s - Instagram is my go to place (and my friends - not everyone has facebook anymore, mine was de-activated a long time ago and it seems to be considered a bit old fashioned)
 
If you ask me Fortean Times went off a cliff when they stopped running ads for those Omax "Massagers", they seemed to be there for over a decade. Those were the golden years.
 
I miss those adverts. Lifetools (? the company that produced psychedelic goggles) and Schwa (? the grey alien head motif people).
I loved them too, really a time capsule of an era.



I bought about 5 schwa t shirts at an unconvention for a quid each once and stupidly gave them away to friends. Wish I still had them, they were cool af.
 
I haven't bought it for years, maybe the last issue I got was in the early 2000s. I usually post on the When Saturday Comes / OTF forum, and again the last time I bought the mag was probably the same time.
In fact, the last magazines I bought were a bunch of David Bowie tribute mags in early '16!
 
Back
Top