Bloggasm Questions the Profitability of SF&F E-Zines

From Ellen Datlow

Bloggasm has a feature article entitled The Rise of the Genre E-Zine: Will It Ever Find a Profitable Model? Here's an excerpt:

Over the next few years the online magazine went on to become an award-winning juggernaut within the speculative fiction community. Because it paid per-word rates higher than any other genre magazine (both print and online) and was headed by a well-respected editor, it quickly gained street cred with popular writers. It wasn’t long before stories published in SCI FICTION made it onto the finalist ballots of just about every major SF award. In 2002 and 2005, Datlow received the Hugo Award for Best Editor, perhaps the most prestigious honor for someone within her profession.

But despite these accomplishments, in 2005 SCI FICTION met its end. In 2004, NBC bought the Sci Fi Channel, and Datlow told me that even though the fiction site was pulling in “good numbers,” it wasn’t performing quite as well as other sections of SciFi.com. Soon, she was informed that the ezine would close its doors forever.