The decision to end printing our magazine starting with the 2025 issues was not made lightly. All of us at WineMaker love print magazines with half our staff working on WineMaker print publications for over 25 years. But over the last several months of 2024 it has become clear the economics of continuing to print WineMaker magazine are simply not sustainable. Our postage and paper costs almost doubled in the last five years and print industry experts say this trend will only continue. The escalating costs come as print subscription revenue is in decline, the newsstand industry for a publication like WineMaker has essentially collapsed, and print-based advertising revenue has dramatically eroded. So we are faced with decreased print revenues and increased production and delivery costs all at once. We already raised our print subscription prices to the limit of what we feel home winemakers will spend annually so that was not an option to bring in more money.
We’ve always said we are in the winemaking content business and not the paper and ink business. And if we continued to print our magazines in the face of collapsing print revenues and spiking print-related costs, it puts WineMaker’s future overall as a business in jeopardy. As a result, we opted instead to make the hard decision to end our print format so we can continue to serve the home winemaking community for years to come with more content and events. To ignore the reality of the grim print financial landscape WineMaker faces would have been irresponsible.
If you had an active WineMaker print subscription at the end of 2024, you’ll be given full credit for all the remaining print issues owed to you in your account with an equal amount of future time as a WineMaker+ member right up until what would have been your print expire date. And you’ll continue to be able to read new issues of WineMaker published in our bi-monthly schedule in the magazine layout of our new fully linked flipbook (that you can also download as a PDF for offline reading) or as individual webpage articles and recipes. Plus online access to 30 years of homebrewing content.
Thank you for your continued support as we look to keep helping you craft your own great wine.
