Felix Salmon argues that all consumer magazines should be free online. I think he’s right in his assessment of magazine readers:

Eventually, magazine publishers will wake up and realise that they have three sets of readers. The first, and largest, is the online-only readers, who would never read the magazine. To maximize their numbers you want to put up as much content as possible in as timely a manner as possible. The second, and smallest, is the people who read the magazine both in print and online. These are your very best and most loyal readers: you want to treat them as well as you can, which once again means maximizing the value of the website and not needlessly crippling it. Finally, in between, there are the old-fashioned readers of the print product, who either subscribe or who buy it at the newsstand, and who then read it in an armchair or on a train or in a waiting room. This is not the kind of activity which can easily be replaced by a website.

I have one more point to add. Before I used the internet a lot, I did subscribe to or regularly buy a few magazines. Now I don’t buy any, but it’s not because I can read the content of those magazines online. It’s because there’s so many interesting blogs to read. Magazine publishers shouldn’t waste their time worrying about their own online content competing with their print magazine. They should worry about competition from other sources.