“The situation is especially sad because the public was still enthusiastic about Maker Media’s products Dougherty said that despite rain, Maker Faire’s big Bay Area event last week met its ticket sales target. 1.45 million people attended its events in 2016. MAKE: magazine had 125,000 paid subscribers and the company had racked up over one million YouTube subscribers. But high production costs in expensive cities and a proliferation of free DIY project content online had strained Maker Media.”
They laid off 22 employees. It seems like they should have been able to make that continue to work. Something seems strange about this, like it’s a move to reinvent the place as a nonprofit or something, or just a way to ditch the magazine. Hopefully something else comes out of it. It would be a shame to lose the momentum of the maker faires. I don’t think the magazine is that great, but the organization and marketing of the community is/was.
It does seems kinda odd, like the Bay area MF seemed to be at a peak last year with a tiny drop off this year but there are so many faires and events I can not imagine them not making money. The tickets are crazy expensive, and then booth and power fees, plus I signed up for a subscription with my tickets and have not heard anything or received a refund as far as I can tell.
That says they lost two big sponsors but there was a full roster of smaller ones. Microsoft’s booth last time was kinda out of place anyway. Fire breathing car, next to microsoft showing of some sort of motherboard, they brought in Q-Bert but put him behind the booth facing a fence about 8 feet away…for his 10 minute set.
Obviously I have no concept of running a business but it seems to have odd timing. It also makes me even more nervous of how many “maker” companies are folding, I can only hope staying in the garage is to my benefit.
These are all closest to me. MF bay area is the only other event I go to besides MRRF, printrbot was about an hour east and we had a few short discussions about CNC and meeting up, Robo former employer is hanging on by a extremely fine thread, Techshop was the big chain maker space around here, Type A 3D printers were almost my neighbors at circuit launch before my move they folded I got spooked.
I was wondering why the San Diego MF went stale (no updates for the 2019 event that was supposed to happen later this year), I was planning on going with my grandson. Maybe we didn’t miss much since the local Yelp reviews from last year weren’t stellar.