Quanta

I continue to be a little bewildered that, on Yahoo's sf magazines category's "Most Popular" list, Quanta continues to outrank everything except Science Fiction Weekly. The reason this puzzles me is that Quanta, though one of the very first online magazines, has been defunct (um, "on hiatus") since 1995, before most people knew there was a Web. It was a nonpaying market; it never had any particularly big names associated with it; it was somewhere in the gray zone between free and shareware. It was pretty cool for its time (and had remarkably high production values, all things considered); I read it for a while, back when it was distributed via email, before the Web. It had 3000 subscribers by the time it ended. But what about it is causing people who search Yahoo to continue to visit it, seven years after it ceased publication? More specifically, why do more people visit it than visit the Asimov's and F&SF sites?

Btw, I can understand why a couple of other no-longer-with-us magazines (Event Horizon and Jackhammer) are on that most-popular list; popular, and fairly high-profile in the online world, and were still publishing not so long ago.

I should note that it's never been clear to me whether the "Most Popular" list means "greatest number of Yahoo visitors clicked the links on this category page" or "greatest number of Yahoo visitors did a search, found this item, and followed the link." The latter would make more sense, I think; otherwise I would expect the most-popular list to be self-perpetuating, because people would be much more likely to follow links on that list than on the rest of the page.

Join the Conversation