CD Austria

» see cdaustria.at as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

CD Austria was sold in Austria, and the same pages went out in Germany and Switzerland under different titles. That is the whole map. I never saw a copy of it, and what is left to go on is the publisher's own company record and the Austrian circulation audit.

CDA Verlag was registered on 3 March 1995 by Marianne and Harald Gutzelnig, in Perg in Upper Austria, and stayed a sixteen person operation. The Austrian line of titles actually starts two years earlier, in 1993, with a magazine called CD Info published by a company called CD Data. CD Info kept running in Austria until September 2003, by which time CD Austria was the main title. From 2000 the publisher was majority owned for several years by ET Multimedia AG, which took 51 percent of it, and the advertising volume was up sixty seven percent by February 2002.

The product was a magazine built around its disc. Every issue shipped with one, a CD-ROM in the early years and later a double sided DVD with software on one face and video tutorials on the other, aimed at home users and at people trying to get something out of an office suite. The February 2003 version of the website lists that month's CD-ROM contents: full version software and shareware, filed next to crossword puzzles. The Österreichische Auflagenkontrolle audited the print run at 16,485 copies for the first half of 2010. The German editions had started out above fifty thousand.

~ the case file ~

~ two titles wearing one schedule ~

CD Austria and CD Austria Praxis alternated every two months, which meant something with the words CD Austria on it appeared on the shelf every month without either title ever being monthly. The same trick ran across the German language market, in Germany and Switzerland, under the names PC News and PC User. PC News had been going since 1995, originally called PC Info. PC User lasted from October 2009 to June 2011.

There was an online attempt too. Vidorial launched in November 2010 as a video tutorial platform, with around three thousand how to films for PC users available on the first day, some of them behind a paywall. It was closed in November 2011 and the site has been unreachable since the end of that year.

~ july 2014 ~

The last issue of CD Austria came out in July 2014. The publisher's own record puts it plainly: it appeared without any notice. The German twin stopped the same month, nineteen years after the first PC Info. No farewell editorial and no press release. The magazine was simply on the shelf one month and not the next.

CDA Verlag did not go with it. In June 2011 it had launched what it called the first Android magazine for the German language market, and by 2013 that title was claiming a hundred and seventy thousand readers against a print run of a hundred thousand, which is more than CD Austria had managed in years. The company is still in Perg. The magazine's own website had given up before the magazine did: by January 2014, six months before the last issue, cdaustria.at was serving nothing but the default control panel page of its hosting provider. Today the name is out of DNS entirely.

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