Magazines 101
In every recession, magazines we’ve grown accustomed to seeing on the newsstand close their doors forever, victims of the slump in advertising dollars that invariably comes during tough economic times. So with last week’s news of Blender’s demise, just the most recent in a string of magazines that have folded since the economic crisis began, I thought it might be useful to talk about some of the realities of magazine publishing.
First off, magazine subscription fees and the money made from newsstand sales does virtually nothing to directly sustain a magazine financially. Those subscriptions and newsstand sales are just the key to bringing in advertising dollars, which is how magazines really make money. Advertisers pay magazines based on the desirability of their demographic of readers, as well as how many of those readers will see the ads they place.
The minimum ratio of advertising pages to editorial pages is 1:1. It takes a page of ads to support a page of editorial. So for every ad page lost, a page of editorial is gone, too.
Even without an economic crisis, this is easy to see. The fat fall issues of magazines reflect the need to advertise in the back-to-school through Christmas buying season; the slender winter issues represent the months after the holidays when consumers aren’t buying as much.
In an economic crisis, the fat fall issues aren’t as chubby; the winter issues are so thin they sometimes don’t look like they’re worth buying.
For those of us who freelance, this is a challenging climate, but also one with opportunities. It’s cheaper to hire a freelancer than to keep fulltime staff, and magazines are looking to pare expenses. But there are also fewer ad pages, and therefore fewer editorial pages available. Pitches must be pitch-perfect to warrant the newly limited space available for articles.
The good news is that magazine publishing is a “leading edge” industry: it’s one of the first industries to feel an economic slowdown, but it’s also on the leading edge of recovery. So as you pass the newsstand, keep your eyes open for thicker magazines–chances are, they’ll be the bellwether of better economic times ahead.