Magazine Advertising

Magazine specialization exists and succeeds because the demographically similar readership of these publications is attractive to advertisers. Advertisers want to target ads for their products and services to those most likely to respond to them.

Despite a 30% tumblein the number of ad pages sold in American magazines from 2006 to 2011, this remains a lucrative situation for the magazine industry. There are about 360 million magazines sold in the United States every year, and their average editorial-to-advertising-page ratio is 53% to 47%. Magazines are often further specialized through split runs, special versions of a given issue in which editorial content and ads vary according to some specific demographic or regional grouping.

Magazines price advertising space in their pages based on circulation, the total number of issues of a magazine that are sold. Th ese sales can be either subscription or single-copy sales. For the industry as a whole, about 68% of all sales are subscription. Some magazines, however— Woman’s Day, TV Guide, and Penthouse, for example— rely heavily on single-copy sales. Subscriptions have the advantage of an ensured ongoing readership, but they are sold below the cover price and have the additional burden of postage included in their cost to the publisher. Single-copy sales are less reliable, but to advertisers they are sometimes a better barometer of a publication’s value to its readers. Single-copy readers must consciously choose to pick up an issue and they pay full price for it. A third form of circulation, controlled circulation, refers to providing a magazine at no cost to readers who meet some specific set of advertiser-attractive criteria. Free airline and hotel magazines fi t this category. Although they provide no subscription or single-sales revenue, these magazines are an attractive, relatively low-cost advertising vehicle for companies seeking narrowly defined, captive audiences. The magazine with the wealthiest readers, in fact, is United Airlines’ Hemisphere. Its 4. 5 million readers have a median household income of $129, 487—double, for example, Vogue’s $67, 024.

Regardless of how circulation occurs, it is monitored through research. The Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) was established in 1914 to provide reliability to a booming magazine industry playing loose with self-announced circulation figures. Other research companies, including Simmons Market Research Bureau and Standard Rate and Data Service, also generate valuable data for advertisers and magazines. Circulation data are often augmented by measures of pass-along readership, which refers to readers who neither subscribe nor buy single copies but who borrow a magazine or read one in a doctor’s office or library.

This traditional model of measurement, however, is under increasing attack. As advertisers demand more precise assessments of accountability and return on their investment, new metrics beyond circulation are being demanded by professionals inside and outside the industry. Speed is only one issue. Others argue that it is one thing for magazine publishers to boast of engagement and affinity, but how are they measured? As a result, the advertising and magazine industries are investigating “a whole different model. ” In 2006, audience assessment firm McPheters& Co. rolled out a new measurement service, Readership. com, designed to provide near real-time information on magazine distribution, readership, and engagement.

Several magazines, most prominently Time, already offer advertisers the option of choosing between total audience and paid circulation when setting advertising rates. Akin to newspapers’ integrated audience except that it totals all readers, not only unique readers, total audience combines print and Web readership. In Time ’s case, for example, circulation jumps from under 4 million to a total audience of five times that size. The goal is to attract advertisers to the Time brand rather than to Time, the magazine.

Even though paid circulation and newsstand sales have fallen over the last several years, the total readership of American consumer magazines increased 8% from 2000 to 2009. Nonetheless, the forces that are reshaping all the mass media are having an impact on magazines. Alterations in how the magazine industry does business are primarily designed to help magazines compete with television and the Internet in the race for advertising dollars. Convergence, too, hasitsimpact.

Online magazines have emerged, made possible by convergence of magazines and the Internet. Most magazines, 83%, now produce online editions offering special interactive features not available to their hard-copy readers (Audit Bureau of Circulations, 2011). Different publications opt for different payment models, but most provide online-only content for free and charge nonsubscribers for access to print magazine content that appears online.

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