[H] Consumer will be closing its doors by the end of the month
 

Finally, we came to a point where so much money had been invested in [H] Consumer that we had to stop the bleeding. I won’t put an exact number on it, but we were literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in the hole. The only reason we were able to stay operational is that we were literally living off of [H] Enthusiast ad money and taking potential reinvestment and expansion opportunities away from them. Still, we were losing money every month.

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1184312

I kind of see this coming. Enthusiasts look/read at/from the monitor; PC users (consumer of the mass) read magazine and watch TV.

I never quite understood why they split up their site in the first space, the people discovering [H] Consumer were also hardocp visitors of the main site, so the split was not really necessary; the different CSS was useful to distinguish the articles, that was enough in my humble opinion.

the Consumer can live on, but drop the full system evaluation system, way too many variables to get any repeatable test scenario. In the end it reads like a BLOG of somebody who buys a PC at a certain store and shares his opinion; you need 10-20 orders from the same company to get a representable idea of how that company "performs" and even that is a very small sample. It's a very hard to do such an evaluation, takes too much time.

Consumer can live on by evaluating "noob" friendly gear in my humble opinion, routers, external HDD enclosures, laptops, keyboards, mice, etc. things somebody who has never opened a PC will buy and can work with.

Have to give them credit for trying. PC magazine business is huge, if only [H] could have tapped into a small portion of it. I believe they are two years ahead of the time.

PC Magazine business is on the decline, due to the internet and home electronics magazines are on the rise but it's questionable how far they can rise


I think [H] lost a whole lot of viewers when they started using their crappy videocard sheme. Now people look more for Xbitlabs and Anandtech.

I know they are on the decline as to newspaper. They are bigger than most of the websites around. I don't think [H] is losing reviewers to Xbitlabs and Anantech; where did you get that.

http://www.ziffdavis.com/press/releases/070322.0.html

VIEWERS not REVIEWERS =P