The cover price of a magazine often doesn't pay for the enormous costs of printing, shipping, and mailing the magazine. The profits come mainly from advertising revenue, which means a magazine has to be attractive to advertisers as well as to readers. That's where BYTE was hurting. We'd like to believe that a magazine popular with readers would be popular with advertisers, too. But it's not necessarily so.
Modern advertisers tend to prefer a very focused audience.
It was always difficult to articulate BYTE's focus. From its start in 1975, BYTE was a technology-oriented, multiplatform magazine. BYTE adhered to that formula for 23 years. BYTE's approach was very different. And once a magazine decides to cover new technology, a multiplatform approach is a must, because new technology doesn't appear on only one platform.