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In early 2022, Jason Sanford published the results of his survey about genre magazines.

I found the last two sections of the summary especially interesting: freeform responses to the questions “What could genre magazines and podcasts do to make you financially support them?” and “Any closing thoughts you'd like to share about SF/F magazines?”

Some of the respondents are coming from definitions and paradigms that I find annoying—for example, there are a few comments of the general form (paraphrased) ~“Magazines are dead, I only read the free stuff on websites.”~

But I feel like other respondents’ answers could provide some useful anecdata for magazines and podcasts that are thinking about things they could do to increase readership and/or bring in more financial support.

I’m not seeing methodology info in that report (though I may just have missed it); for example, I don’t know how many respondents there were, or how the survey was distributed/advertised, or anything about the demographics of respondents other than what they volunteered about themselves in some of those free responses. So I wouldn’t put too much weight on these responses; I assume that this wasn’t the kind of random-sample survey that professional pollsters do. (And even those come with caveats.) And some of the respondents’ suggestions directly contradict other respondents’ suggestions; no one venue could follow all of the suggestions here.

But even so, I think there are some interesting thoughts in those responses.