It pretty much ended in the 1980's but its worth mentioning that Byte never was 'for the masses', it was for the relatively geeky subset of the tech community (my absolute favorite mag from about '80-86 or so). Sure, there were some holdouts into the 90's but the enthusiast scene had faded significantly by the late 80's as computing went mainstream. And then died completely in the early-to-mid 90's as Windows took off. Unfortunately it's a reflection of the computing audience: In the 70's it was largely hardware hackers, in the 80's it was largely software hackers, in the 90's it was largely (business) software users, since the 00's it has been mostly consumers. (I'm exaggerating a bit as there have always been all types in every era, but this is what I remember the main focus as being)
In the 70's and 80's these types of magazines were economically viable as people were willing to pay (gasp) for content like this and even so I don't think it was ever a spectacularly good business as the audience wasn't terribly large. Today, it would be at best extremely difficult to (profitably) run a web site targeting the same audience. Sure, the audience is at least 1-2 orders of magnitude larger but they are also far less willing to spend money and their attention is diluted by all the noise in the space. You could point to things like github but notice that the bulk of the 'content' on those sites are produced by the users of the sites who are not even the customers of those sites. This is why we can't have nice things...
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In the 70's and 80's these types of magazines were economically viable as people were willing to pay (gasp) for content like this and even so I don't think it was ever a spectacularly good business as the audience wasn't terribly large. Today, it would be at best extremely difficult to (profitably) run a web site targeting the same audience. Sure, the audience is at least 1-2 orders of magnitude larger but they are also far less willing to spend money and their attention is diluted by all the noise in the space. You could point to things like github but notice that the bulk of the 'content' on those sites are produced by the users of the sites who are not even the customers of those sites. This is why we can't have nice things...