Man Is The Media.
Mygazines is Back From the Dead, Now Trying to Make a Buck
January 7th, 2009 by Martin
I’m pretty sure I was one of the first to note that Mygazines, the dirty and thus popular magazine sharing site, was dead. Now, I came across this 22 days old random tweet, and curiously followed the old URL to see what was up. Yes, indeed, Mygazines is back.
[Update: Digging around a bit more, I found this post by Dylan Stableford on Folio that reveals who the mysterious Pierre is, mentioned in the tweet above.]
As I noted in my previous post, their technology was great, but their approach less than great. Or it may have been just that, as traffic soared. There has been more than one P2P sharing site and similar services, that took a shortcut to fame, and then went legit, so maybe it wasn’t all that bad altogether.
But I hardly think this is the case here. In their last statement as they entered the deadpool, Mygazines blamed the financial situation, and to my knowledge that hasn’t changed much, except for the worse. Now they seem to focus solely on an enterprise model, without community and all that jazz (I haven’t signed up for it yet, and to be honest I probably won’t). My guess is, and this is purely speculation, is that someone with a big wallet saw potential in their technology, known brand, and large user database (when they were live).
One would think that their somewhat obscure past would be less than ideal in establishing credibility in the world of enterprise. I mean, you have to pay to publish now, using the same document viewer that was once free. But at least it seems they have worked a little more with transparency, e.g. adding a phone number to the sales department and changing the legendary ‘John Smith’ domain owner record. The domain is now registered to
Flyp Technologies Inc.
10 Bellair St. #1604
Toronto, Ontario m5r3t8
CanadaTechnical Contact:
Schwartz, Yoav
Mr. Schwartz’s email address is under the domain ‘flyptech.com’, which redirects back to Mygazines. A few name searches didn’t find much conclusive information, but of course anyone from the Flyp team are welcome to drop me an email to enlighten us all.
Once again it will be very interesting to see how this goes down. With their new enterprise approach they are entering an extremely crowded space. One would argue that after the deadpool they nothing to lose. But to convince me, and probably anyone else who’ve read the news, to pay up more than just a few dollars, they would certainly need to show their faces much more clearly than they are just now. And although I’m no expert on best pricing in this space, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t help that they are charging a whopping $300 per document, especially since there a quite a few free services out there that are still very much alive.
As an exit of this post, and a beginning of what might be another chapter for Mygazines, I can’t help myself but quote first entry in their new FAQ:
How long can I keep my Mygazines digital publications up for?Forever and ever and ever.
But of course, in the lightning fast webspace, even forever might be over before you know it.
