Computer Buyer

~ the eulogy ~

Computer Buyer ran from 1991 to March 2009 as a Dennis Publishing monthly, which in British newsstand terms means eighteen years of telling people which PC to buy and what the parts inside it were worth. It sat one shelf along from Computer Shopper, the much fatter Dennis title, and it was never the glamorous one. People bought it for the price tables.

The circulation story is the whole story. ABC put the 2007 average at 9,477 copies an issue, of which 3,481 went over the counter. By the end of 2008 the newsstand half had fallen under two thousand a month, and a monthly magazine selling two thousand copies to strangers is a hobby with a printing bill.

Since 2007 the magazine had been written and edited entirely by freelancers. There was no staff left to lay off, which is why its closure produced no redundancies and almost no noise. Hexus, reporting the news on the day, pointed out the obvious consequence: there was no sales team and no full-time editorial team on the title by then.

~ the dossier ~

~ the shield ~

Dennis said out loud what the magazine had been for. It was launched in 1991 to protect Computer Shopper from PC Direct, which Ziff Davis had just brought to Britain as one of its first titles outside the United States. A rival publisher launches into your market and you put a cheaper monthly across its path, so that your flagship keeps its readers.

It worked. PC Direct was sold on to VNU and closed in 2001, and Computer Buyer carried on for another eight years after the magazine it was built to fight had gone. Then it spent those eight years in a market where the reason for its existence no longer applied, which is a slower way to die than losing.

~ the statement ~

The closure was announced on 12 January 2009, and the Dennis statement is unusually candid for a trade press release. It gives the founding reason in parentheses, with a sideswipe at PC Direct's owner as "the then mighty Ziff-Davis", and it claims the title "generated over £5million of profit for Dennis" across its run. Then: "With a newsstand sale of fewer than 2,000 copies a month it has become impossible to keep publishing the title."

The line everyone quoted was the last one. "It is always sad to close a magazine even, as in this case, if it simply winks out rather than disappears with a bang. But Buyer did its job, and did it brilliantly." The assets went to Computer Shopper, the title the magazine had been protecting since 1991. Hexus noted that the March issue, the last one, had most likely gone to press the previous November, which is how cover dates work on print monthlies: the final issue was finished before anybody announced the ending.

~ where i got my prices ~

In 2009 I was twenty five and buying parts in Ankara. Nothing in that process involved a magazine. Specifications and prices came off Turkish forums, donanimhaber above all, where people posted their build and argued about it in the replies and carried their hardware list around in their signature. The research was free and in my own language, and it updated as often as somebody felt like posting.

That is the thing a British buying-guide monthly was selling, and it is exactly what the web took first. A magazine listing last month's prices could not compete with a forum thread listing yesterday's, and once you counted the printing schedule, the magazine was already a month behind when it reached a shelf.

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