The Daily Parker

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Sad day in software development

After 38 years of publication, Dr. Dobbs is shutting down:

Why would a well-known site, dearly loved by its readers and coming off a year of record page views, be sunset by its owner?

In one word, revenue. 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. This is because in the last 18 months, there has been a marked shift in how vendors value website advertising. They've come to realize that website ads tend to be less effective than they once were.

So rather than continue with Dr. Dobb's until it actually loses money, [our owners] decided to sunset the site — a sudden end to remarkably robust and wondrous journey that began 38 years ago.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Dr. Dobb's was the best source of information about C/C++ programming, bar none. I've read the magazine and the website off and on for about 30 years. I'm sad to see it go.

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