Flying Magazine's Subscriber Turnaround

A story about how Craig Fuller transformed Flying Magazine's business model after acquiring it.

"When we bought Flying Magazine, they were losing $7 per subscriber. The magazine was generating on average $8 in revenue per subscriber per year, but it cost them $15 to fill that subscriber. They had been losing money on every subscriber since as far back as our data went - since 2006.

When we took over, we raised the subscription price to $30. We started with 108,000 subscribers, but when we raised the price it dropped to 32,000 subscribers. That was okay - we wanted to get rid of what we called 'freeloaders.' These were people who got subscriptions through school fundraisers or targeted advertising programs who didn't actually care about the content.

I said I don't want any of them - I want people who actually care about the content. Think about this: to buy an airplane, you're going to spend minimum $50,000 for an old aircraft, up to quarter of a million to a million dollars. Some of our audience is buying $75-100 million airplanes. If they're not willing to spend $30 or $40 on a subscription, they don't really care about the content.

We were very successful in doing that. We doubled the subscription revenue over the course of a year despite having only a third of the subscribers. We're now back up to about 45,000 subscribers, all paying full price."