Dr. Dobb's to Cease Publishing

Posted on December 29, 2014

The Dr. Dobb's site will no longer publish new content after the end of 2014. The publisher, United Business Media (UBM), has decided to sunset the site. This means the publication's archives will remain but there will be no new content published. The programming journal was first published as a newsletter in 1976. The magazine ended its print edition and became an online only publication in 2009.

Traffic is not a problem at all for drdobbs.com which has generated over 10 million page views this year. This is a 25% increase from the site's traffic in 2011. Despite the site's growing traffic it has been unable to deliver enough revenue. Dr. Dobb's Editor in Chief Andrew Binstock writes in a farewell article that revenues have plunged by around 70%.

Binstock says, "Four years ago, when I came to Dr. Dobb's, we had healthy profits and revenue, almost all of it from advertising. Despite our excellent growth on the editorial side, our revenue declined such that today it's barely 30% of what it was when I started. While some of this drop is undoubtedly due to turnover in our sales staff, even if the staff had been stable and executed perfectly, revenue would be much the same and future prospects would surely point to upcoming losses."

Binstock explains that some of Dr. Dobb's competitors, such as BZ Media, have launched small conferences as a way to boost revenues and combat the advertising decline.