I have heard many times over the past few years that newspapers are in serious decline. How healthy is the magazine industry nowadays?
Not very. Newsweek is up for sale, having lost tens of millions of dollars in each of the last two years.
It depends. General interest weeklies, like Newsweek, are taking a huge hit. A lot of specialty magazines, like The Nation, are doing quite well. In fact, I believe that during the Bush administration, The Nation became the wealthiest opinion journal.
Magazines are dying the same hideous shrieking death that newspapers are and for the same reason: advertisers are finding other ways to spend money.
The percentage of magazine that don’t need advertising to survive is extremely tiny, but they are also in trouble due to increases in paper and printing costs and postal charges. Magazines will survive only as vinyl records have survived.
To watch the carnage up close go to Magazine Death Pool.
This page, linked to from Exapno’s link, tells the grim story succinctly:
http://www.theawl.com/2009/11/a-graphic-history-of-magazine-income-over-the-last-decade
I’m amazed how The New Yorker and Rolling Stone actually appear to have gone up.
And, in many cases, their readers are going online to get the same content, in a more timely fashion.
And for free 
For now, anyway. Sooner or later advertisers are going to realise that nobody looks at web adverts, and the web will have to start paying its way.
Wired is my absolute favorite magazine, although it comes close with Cooks Illustrated.
Wired is supposedly a techie magazine, exactly the segment that knows how to go online and get their stuff for free. I think, though, that enough people recognize the quality of the publication, and the convenience of printed matter, that it’s not died. It’s one of those rare magazines that I read (so I imagine others do) from cover to cover, as attention span allows. The web is a different experience. No one has an attention span. If you subscribe to both Maxim and Wired, which subscription are you going to cut when it’s time to tighten your belt?
In the case of Cooks, it’s free of advertising. In addition, most of their web-site content is paywalled. One’s not a replacement for the other, and I subscribe to both. It hasn’t quite the broad of of Wired, but the ad-free content seems to make me feel that they’re at less risk. You know, unless all of the other subscribers stop subscribing.
I heard this same prediction a couple years ago, and have been waiting to see if it comes true.
When the internet was new, there used to be a lot talk about targeting ads, counting eyeballs and click-thru rates. But is there any research to show that web advertising works?
Personally, I completely ignore the ads on most web sites.
I recently helped translate an English-language web site for a non-English speaker: I looked at the screen and explained the gist of the site, and then he slowly tried to read it with his limited language skills. I was surprised when he asked me to translate a lot of words which I hadn’t seen on the screen —And then I suddenly realized why: because he was unfamiliar with the language, he was trying to read the ads carefully,— when I hadn’t even noticed them at all.
I just instinctively knew how to find the meat of the web site, and ignore all the stuff on the edges.
Here at the Dope, we often joke about the google ads that appear (often inappropriately) at the bottom of a thread.So I suppose that we pay more attention to the ads than users of other web sites. But I personally know that I have NEVER once clicked on one of those ads.
So are we likely to see a decline in web advertising, just like newspaper and magazine ads?
Every once in a while I click on an ad. By accident.
But with ad-blocking extensions to browsers it makes them even less relevant than they already were (I don’t see any ads on the SDMB, for instance, yet I’m not a paying member either). It’s going to be hard to move forward into the future when we’ve learned that you can pretty much get by as a total freeloader. Who wants to pay for anything ephemeral nowadays? The only things with value are physical goods.
a) Nobody cares whether you personally click on an ad or not. All that matters is that sufficient numbers of people do. Sufficient numbers of people click on and send money to spam emails to keep them coming. You only need one in a million.
b) You say “most” web sites. That means you do click on some web sites. You no longer have an argument.
That said, whether any particular web site, or particular ad, type of ad, or advertising technique is profitable is a different issue. Some are, some aren’t. But I guarantee you that advertisers love people who claim that they “completely ignore the ads on most web sites.” Money will be made off of them.
Sadly, comics are also vanishing, although I suspect it is because they aren’t writing for kids anymore.
Really? Are you separating ‘comics’ from ‘graphic novels’? What about the collector’s market?
What collector’s market?