November 21, 2013

Share: Bee Culture, December issue

Logged in to my Bee Culture digital subscription and noticed a Share button. Does this work for you? UPDATE: never mind. Julie kindly tested the link and we found out that it's a big ol' "PSYCH!" Bee Culture won't let you see anything of value, which is a shame because there's a semi-interesting article on walk-away splits.

Now I know this magazine is run by a handful of people who are essentially beekeepers, not magazine publishers or marketers, but when you do something, you have to do it right or don't bother doing it at all. In today's world of social sharing, the share button is, well, for sharing. Not for generating revenue. If you want to earn subscribers, you have to, well, earn us. Provide something of value. Only giving access to ads is of no value.

Okay, rant over. I'll give you a great tip of good value. If you subscribe to the digital edition of Bee Culture, you can choose a 3-month option for just $2.99. What you get is 90-day access to the magazine and during that time you can log in and save each issue to your computer. Rather time-consuming, but you can download every issue in the archives (which is a few years back) for off-line reading. (It's the same with ABJ Digital, BTW.) As it is not posted on their website, you will have to contact Bee Culture via email for the $2.99 option. (Don't bother DMing them on Twitter... tweets @BeeCulture seem to fall on deaf ears. They just don't seem to get the social thing. And that concludes my second rant.)
Must be the money.
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I've got an archive of actual magazine up for grabs. Bee Culture January 2011–January 2012 and American Bee Journal February 2011–January 2012. You pay for postage, and they're yours. Email if interested.

2 comments:

Julie D said...

Well, your link took me to the mag, but I was only able to see a couple pages of ads before I got a message saying that I needed a subscription in order to continue reading.

HB said...

Apologies, @Julie. That was not nice of Bee Culture, now was it? It is ironic that Kim Flottum laments about offers from Bee Culture being seen with suspicion in his opening piece this month. A suspicion deservedly earned IMO.

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