By David Gewirtz
On December 23, 1997, we wrote our first news story. We wanted to get in a week of practice and testing before we went live. On January 1, 1998, PalmPower Magazine went live and we published our first issue online. This week, we reached a huge milestone: 10 years of continuous publishing online here at ZATZ.
Of course, it wouldn't be until March of 1999 that we officially became ZATZ Publishing. By that time, we'd launched three magazines: PalmPower, Windows CE Power, and DominoPower. Both PalmPower and Windows CE Power (along with PalmPower's Enterprise Edition and Pocket PC Life) would eventually become part of Computing Unplugged Magazine and DominoPower has become the undisputed leading online magazine for the Lotus community.
"We saved 287,427 trees. Our saved trees could keep Palm Bay carbon-neutral for almost thirty years!"
Rounding out our offerings, OutlookPower has become the go-to magazine for help with email, Microsoft Outlook, and Exchange, Connected Photographer Magazine found a unique niche in helping people get the most out of their cameras, and WebSpherePower is now the pre-eminent news source for IBM Java, WebSphere, and Eclipse IT professionals.
Let me hit you with some mind-blowing numbers:
- 8 magazines
- 360 authors
- 2,338 in-depth articles
- 36,413 news stories
- 50,381 outbound links to other Web sites
- 1,102,530 email newsletter subscribers
- 529,214,400 individual email newsletters mailed
- 1,866,000,000 Web pages served
Denise Amrich and I started ZATZ after heading up a number of print magazines for Ziff. One of our earliest debates was whether we should produce our magazines online, in print, or both. Obviously, we finally chose to produce the magazines online. No trees were killed in the production of our content.
How many trees have we saved?
Which brings me to a question I've never fully explored: just how many trees did we save? If you combine the 1.8 billion or so Web pages we've served with the 529 million email newsletters we've sent out, and you conservatively estimate each page or newsletter corresponds to one printed page, we'd have consumed about 2.4 billion pages of paper.
The Conservatree site estimates that one tree will produce 8333.3 sheets of paper. Given this, we can calculate we'd have consumed 287,427 trees. That's just astounding.