Jason Sanford has an interesting blog entry on online genre magazines and their circulation. The large pro sites get about the same traffic as this humble website. Online magazines get a good percentage of their hits on the submission guidelines pages. Traffic on sites with audio downloads far exceeds sites with written pages.
If Strange Horizon’s gets between 800 and 1,500 unique users per day, I would call that a failure. Figuring the size of the internet and the potential audience, to get only 1,000 hits seems like random noise. People pressing the I feel lucky link on Google could account for that kind of traffic. AstoundingTales.com in its heyday did as well.
The article also indicates something that I have said before: Most of the readers of genre magazines are authors who want to sell stories, rather than readers looking to read. There is some intersection between these two groups.
I still feel that genre fiction is subject to the laws of thermodynamics. and will sink into heat death eventually.
Third law of thermodynamics Genre Fiction:
Zeroth Law:
If two genre ezines are separately in readership equilibrium with a third, they are also in readership equilibrium with each other.
First Law:
The change in the readership of a genre ezine is equal to the sum of the amount of interested readers supplied to or removed from the genre ezine, or we can say ” In an isolated genre ezine the readership is constant”.
Second Law:
The total apathy of any isolated genre ezine always increases over time, approaching a maximum value or we can say “in a genre ezine, the apathy never decreases”.
Third Law:
As a system asymptotically approaches absolute zero of readers, all processes virtually cease, and the apathy of the genre ezine asymptotically approaches a minimum value; also stated as: “the apathy of all ezines and of all genre ezines is zero at absolute zero” or equivalently “it is impossible to reach the absolute zero of readership by any finite number of processes”.
To rephrase:
0) All genre ezines are essentially the same.
1) There are only a limited number of readers of genre readers
2) Readers lose interest over time in genre fiction
3) For every magazine there will eventually be just one reader – probably the editor – at which point the magazine will contain only unread archives.