Hi Richie,
I'm afraid it's always gonna be down to money; first and foremost, the cost of printing up thousands of copies of magazines and staff etc is always [now at least] gonna be impossible with the amount of ad money sloshing around in the pots of different companies.
The paintball industry has been thru a real rough time of it lately and I'm afraid the sort of money required to put an ad in a printed magazine just isn't available.
As for a digital, on-line magazine?
There are a few knocking around who are surviving but since the ad revenue is soo low, people just can't allot the time and cost of producing it; the Industry needs to target as many ballers as they can per ad campaign and the one place this seems to happen is the forums.
These on-line magazines end up festooning the pages with ads and even more ads and the sad irony is, a lot of these ads aren’t even paid for, they’re put in to either entice the company being advertised or as magazine fillers ... they’re just padding out the pages...
The US Forum, PbNation was recently sold for I think 3.2 million dollars and the reason it attracted that price tag was purely and simply the traffic it tended to generate.
If I were still a player, I’d definitely want to read a magazine but lotsa people will always say ‘yeah yeah, we’ll buy it, read it’, whatever, but when push comes to shove .. it just don’t happen ... and that is why we are in the position we find ourselves in .....sad but true ..