Article is paywalled... but NOW where am I supposed to get my garden zombies and my name spelled out in pictures of famous landmarks?
Yeah thankfully news searching is pretty easy. Found this:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/skymall-lands-bankruptcy-flight-shopping-151207159.html;_ylt=AwrSyCTbtcJULmMAC5.TmYlQThis area here points to a problem:
"With the increased use of electronic devices on planes, fewer people browsed the SkyMall in-flight catalog," Chief Financial Officer Scott Wiley said in court papers. He listed Amazon.com Inc. and EBay Inc. as among competitors with greater resources and more customers. New technology and the cost of getting the magazine on planes "made the traditional in-flight SkyMall catalog increasingly unattractive to the airlines," he said.
I read that to mean that the Skymall magazines were a pain for the airlines to keep on board, especially in light of the fact all the affluent flyers (the ones who can afford to buy Skymall crap to begin with) are also affluent enough to have a tablet or phone to entertain them instead, especially if the flight has WiFi. Thus the airlines were either demanding more of Skymall for the hassle of keeping planes stocked with the magazines or something along those lines.
It makes sense though: people who are wealthy and like to buy gadgets are probably the prime target for Skymall magazine, but those exact people are the ones who likely have their own phone/tablet and are willing to pay for in-flight WiFi rather than read the Skymall magazine and buy stuff from there.
Pretty much all print media is on its way out as we transition to the paperless world, so with Skymall being so focused on that physical print format, it was kind of inevitable that they'd find themselves unable to compete, since they certainly didn't compete with amazon on price for gadgets, or compete with your local grocery store in terms of supplying necessities.
As for how big the business is:
The business generated $33.7 million of revenue in 2013, according to court filings. In early 2014, the company had tried to remake itself as an online retailer but ran out of cash to pay employees and vendors before it could learn whether the experiment was working.
So $33.7 million in 2013 versus about $75
billion from Amazon in 2013.