As newspapers and magazines struggle to keep eyeballs from turning to the free world of the Web, more and more blogs are rising up to fill the niches once dominated by print. Despite the changing landscape, magazines are still able to command high advertising rates that blogs can’t match (yet). Wanting to find out whether magazines or blogs provided the best bang of each advertising buck, photographer Trey Ratcliff recently spent $26,000 placing ads in three major photography magazines, comparing the results to his online affiliate ad returns. His conclusion?

If I was consulting for one of these product companies that puts significant funds into magazine advertising, I would challenge them to try something new for six months: Try taking 50% of that money and put it into several hundred blogs, podcasts and review sites and measure the results. Cut the worst performers and find new ones.

Only one of the three magazines actually made Ratcliff money (the other two lost over ten thousand dollars) — the one that included an online ad rotation as part of the package.

Stop Advertising in Photo Magazines – Head West to the Web [Trey Ratcliff]

Thanks for sending in the tip, Troy!

There’s a sweet deal on some popular magazines going on over at Discount Magazines. Annual subscriptions to Popular Photography, Digital Photo, American Photo, and Outdoor Photographer are just $5 if you use the coupon code “PHOTO” at checkout. You can subscribe for up to 3 years for all of them except Outdoor Photography, which is limited to one year.

Update: Sorry, but the deal is only available to US residents… (thx @delineated!).

If the entire Calvin and Hobbes collection can be found in a complete set, then why shouldn’t National Geographic? Well now it can!

A couple weeks ago National Geographic began selling its complete collection of magazines on a 160GB hard drive through its store. The hard drive contains a digital copy of every single magazine published over the past 120 years, and includes all of the beautiful, top-notch photographs the magazine is known for.

What’s even better is the fact that the magazines are packaged in an application that allows you to search for particular topics or even photographs. The hard drive has 90GB of free space for your own use, comes with a DVD with photo tips, and costs $199.95.

Complete National Geographic 160-GB Hard Drive (via DivePhotoGuide)