Infoworld, one of the oldest professional IT publications, has abandoned its print format. Starting next month, the publication will be exclusively issued online.

The publication's general manager disclosed the move on a company blog on Sunday. Rumours of the pending move had started to appear earlier. He dismissed print as a "nearly obsolete distribution channel", which can't sit very well with Computer World, a sister publication by Infoworld's parent company IDG that hasn't made any public disclosures on abandoning its paper edition.

26 Mar 2007

Infoworld's time had definitely come. Rumors about the publications decreasing sales and subscriptions have been going around for years. But folding a paper publication isn't as easy and obvious as it may seem.

Publishers have a wealth of data on their paper readers thanks to the 'controlled circulation' model. Advertisers know exactly who reads the publication, what the size is of the budgets that they control and which purchase decisions they make.

Websites often don't know much more than their visitor's IP addresses. While Google adsense and Yahoo's Overture in part have solved that problem by charging per click, paper advertising rates are still a factor 10 to 100 higher than their online equivalents.