In the part of the newspaper where they list movies by ticket revenue, books by sales, etc., they have figures for magazines as well. “Advertising pages” is the metric used. What does that mean, exactly?
Pages that have advertising on them :rolleyes:
A 64-page magazine might have (totally made-up numbers here) 40 pages of “editorial” (content produced by the magazine staff for the delectation of its readers) and 24 pages of advertising. Note that those 24 pages will probably not all be full-page ads; if three different pages each have 1/3 of the page devoted to ads, that would add up to 1 advertising page.
Until Jonathan Chance can get here and give you a better answer:
Magazines, in general, make their money from advertising. You can often get a cheap subscription to even a fairly glossy magazine (“Vogue” runs under $20 a year) because the rates that advertisers pay are based on circulation. The trick is to balance a few different elements:
[ul][li]Get a nice high rate for your advertising pages, by keeping circulation high[/li][li]Sell enough advertising pages to cover the expense of editorial (paying staff, buying articles, commissioning or obtaining photography) and overhead, plus turn a profit[/li]Not have so many advertising pages that it pisses off your readers[/ul]
Thanks for the insight.
If a magazine has 40 pages of advertising in it, I you’d multiply 40 by the number of issues sent out. Clearly you count issues sent to subscribers. Do you count newstand sales? What about issues delivered to newsracks but were unsold? Is it a per-issue calculation or an annualized figure? Why is this the standard metric? it seems to difficult to compare, say, GQ, which has a very high proportion of advertising in it, to The Economist, which has relatively little advertising.
Paid subscribers are tallied by the Audit Bureau of Circulation.
That is why you can get a subscription to most general circulation magazines at discount off the LIST price, usually via other agencies.
The publishers are now setting you up to renew automatically some six months prior to current expiration or even two years ahead at full published rates.
The USPS requires a “page count” of actual column inches equivalent pages and for editorial content. A page of 1/3 text and 2/3 advertising would be tallied as such.
The USPS then charges at different rates for each content.
No, the number of advertising pages is just the number of advertising pages. You don’t multiply by anything. (Well, you do add them up on an annual basis but only to see if yo are going up or down from year to year.)
Advertising rates, however, are set by circulation. A magazine may guarantee 1,000,000 circulation for its issue and then charge $10,000 for a full page ad. If the circulation drops the advertiser can ask for free ad space. If the circulation increases then the magazine can charge more in a new contract. Circulation does include all means of distribution including subscriptions and single issue sales before returns.
Different magazines have different business models. The Economist charges a relatively high subscription rate but probably has high retention, i.e. its subscribers keep coming back. GQ has to work much harder to keep its subscribers and so keeps the subscription costs artificially low and gets most of its money from advertising.
No. Not the number of pages with advertising but the equivalent number of pages of column inches of advertising and the equivalent number of pages of column inches of editorial/textual content that is used by the USPS to calculate postage requirements among other criteria. See prior post, last paragraph.
Yes, I am ignoring you. Anything the USPS charges for mail is totally irrelevant to the matter of advertising pages as used as a metric in the industry.
I assume you are referring to the publishing industry.
What then do the count a page that is half & half?
Exactly how Twickster explained it back in post #2, so well there’s no need to re-explain it each and every time it’s mentioned.
Damn, am I late to this party. And I got invoked, too. I should vanity search more often.
Xap’s right, of course. We measure ad count in fractional pages. My latest issue had 6.5 pages of advertising out of 16 total pages (weekly newspaper).
For advertising metrics it’s possible to track the relative success of magazine’s by comparing total pages moved. It’s not a great measurement because there are a million different factors that can go into it, of course. But people like to measure and compare things.
In terms of USPS, of course, there is a function of postage when looking at percentage of advertising in any issue. Get above certain levels as a percentage and the USPS will charge you more as a catalog than as a periodical. It can be painful and is one of the reasons that magazines that have a HUGE amount of advertising like some of the Bridal magazines and such, like to have the newsstand and grocery store as a primary delivery system. It means they eat less in the increased postage AND can have 75%+ of advertising.
I’d inject another factor into Xap’s list of factors in setting ad costs: Size of industry. An industry with a lot of people might have little free income or need for advertising. That will force down rates even for a high circ magazine.
I’ll also point out that sometimes the quality of circulation can control ad costs. In one pub I was Circulation Director for a long time ago we were sincerely behind the biggest magazine in the industry (this was trade press) and I didn’t have the budget to go much higher. So I turned my attention to defining decision makers and hitting them. We could then go to advertisers and say 'We go to fewer but the ones who get our pub are the people who making buying decisions for their locations." Worked like a charm.
Oh, and both BPA and ABC audit both paid and unpaid circulation. Useful firms but you need to know how to game their systems to really succeed.