All over the world, blogs are started, maintained, and written to. They are read, whether it be by 1 viewer or 1,000,000,000. Some eventually turn into magazines. Other times, it is a magazine + blog combo. Some just stay blogs. Others might collate their blog posts into a book.
These blogs, sites, and magazines are written by people of all kinds of ages for people of all kinds of ages. There’s fashion blogs written by experts, food blogs written by stay-at-home moms, and there’s plenty of blogs written by tech-savvy teens about tech.
Lets take an example: Magnate Magazine.
Magnate was a magazine that followed Corby magazine, all manned by Sean Spooner.
At the beginning of Magnate’s journey, Sean asked a bunch of people that he knew to start writing and give it some content. A bunch of people from many different age groups said yes, most of them fairly young.
I was one of them, along with a couple more of my friends, Jack Benson and Miramar Jackson.
All three of us volunteered and wrote a few posts for Magnate, all of which got attention and were great content.
It is now quite a while later. Magnate has grown a bit, and they’re getting ready to print their first hard copy issue, when both Jack and Miramar get this email:
Dear Jack,
First of all, I would like to thank you for contributing to Magnate Magazine. Your pieces have helped build and develop the website to the point that it is at today and it couldn’t have been done without your support and hard work.
As we near the launch date of November 10th, 2012 we are looking to strengthen our online and print teams. Because of this, we are required to seek new authors who meet our target audience and due to your age, this does not factor into our ideal target age and we are saddened to say we are having to let you go.
Thanks again for your support and contributions, Jack. We are very grateful and wish you the best of luck for the future.
Warm Regards on behalf of the Magnate team,
Jonny Rowntree
Head of Online
They’re not at the ideal “target age”.
Not to mention, I was kicked off the team without them even telling me. Thanks.
Anyways, why is “brand” associated with “age”? Why do they need to be connected?
Well, here’s what magnate did.
- Start off with a website and get anyone we can to write for free
- Collect ad revenue and don’t give it out
- Create a print magazine
- Kick off everyone that was young and helped out in the beginning to make the brand seem older
Basically, they’ve used us. They used us to get them going, then screwed us off because they have more important things to deal with.
I know that this isn’t the only time that something like this has happened. It happens all of the time – people give young, passionate writers a place to write, then once they’re big enough, they forget about the young and passionate writers and move on to being a brand.
So this is what I say:
People with companies, please don’t just forget about your writers who sacrificed their time and effort for you.
People with computers, try to stay away from sites or magazines that you know doesn’t care about writers.
I’ll let you all know of more sites like this, but for now, stay away from magnate – don’t let them win. #boycottmagnate
(PSST: Click here to tweet that you disapprove of Magnate’s “brand development strategies”. )