John, your more experienced than me about this, but for any company ( use Coke as a example ) to see value in writing a check to advertise in a magazine that only comes out 6 time per year with a 1300-1450 circulation, seems kinda stupid to me. I can't see this idea working out.
I could see the idea working out online, where the PRA website might have thousands of hits daily when and if the website becomes what it should be
You're correct a circulation of 1300 to 2000 members would be difficult to sell.
That's why we haven't setup a commission sales staff with the small membership we currently have. It would almost surly be domed to fail.
However we have already done a marketing test using PRA-TV as the test page.
It was getting about 1000 hits per-day and we have at least 4 new pages that could increase our circulation just about as much.
I do know that the main reason everyone isn't rich is because most just don't make the effort to try it. Nothing ventured nothing gained but those that try get some increase in revenue.
It will take less than two weeks to discover if we can sell 100 new $50.00 monthly ads or not.
I feel certain we should at least try, before we scrap the hard-copy.
Also don't rule out how much Coke will pay for an exclusive right to advertise and what they feel it's worth to keep both Pepsi and Dr Pepper out of even a small vertical market. Also I can sell the image, of cool and or bad boy image.
If we can make it break even, then I'd like to suggest we take it to the next step.
That's printing 10's of thousands of magazines and drop them of to all the airports for free. Free always increases a magazine circulation as it did with a boating magazine I help create and it's now making millions from the advertising alone the mag is free so just about everyone reads it. Which makes selling ads a no brainier.
Either way, online or hard-copy, I will help sell advertising for anything we got.
But I also know, if you don't at least try. No one will ever know if it could be done or not.