Mr. Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired, who gives 50 speeches a year for an estimated $35,000 to $50,000 apiece (up to 2 and a half million dollars just for speeches) promoting big ideas, writes best-selling books such as “The Long Tail” has yet to come up with one big enough to save Wired's business. According to today's NYT article:

The magazine has lost 50 percent of its ad pages so far this year, ranking among the worst off of the more than 150 monthly magazines measured by Media Industry Newsletter.

Mr. Anderson seems to believe that by redesigning the Wired magazine three times and winning National Magazine Award design category two years running he would reinvegorate the struggling print business model.

But it is still one of the least popular magazines at Condé Nast, with a circulation of only 704,000. Its Web site, meanwhile, is the most popular of Condé Nast’s magazine sites, with about 11 million unique visitors a month, according to the company’s internal figures. That suggests that technology-forward readers prefer to read articles in a technology-forward way.

And yet, when publication had to downsize it eliminated a quarter of its Web employees and only four print employees.

Mr. Anderson belives in Free. He even wrote a book about it “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” which comes out in July and is guaranteed to be another best-seller. Another thing Mr. Anderson belives is the buzz. It takes a lot of it to be a tech guru and get paid for it.

“The problems are obvious, the range of solutions are obvious,” he said.