Magazine Wood for the Trees

Tuesday, 23 September, 2008

I have a thing for magazines, but I've started to cut down on buying them. The ones I tend to keep, I hold sacred and I still bear the psychological scars from when a friend unwittingly cut a coupon from one of my special editions.

So it's with some departure that I just cut up the latest issue of .net magazine. Its not cheap by any means, although its priced at what seems like a standard £5.99.

Why cut it? Well, leafing through the pages, I got distracted by all the full page hosting adverts. I'm sure some readers will find them useful, but I haven't needed to go shopping for bandwidth for quite a few years.

My mind has been set on 'minimalising' during the last few months, and having bought this magazine for some of the useful articles, I wanted to see how much I could get rid of.

The mag is 132 pages.

I managed to cut out 32 pages where there were back to back, full page adverts.

There were still 17 full page adverts left in the magazine and a couple of half page ads - I guess most advertisers don't do things by half!

That leaves less than 82 pages of *real* content out of 132 pages. Is this even legal? I have drawn the following conclusions from my handiwork:

1. The content to ad ratio means a you're only getting a shocking 62% of real content in the mag.
2. I shouldn't be surprised - mags have always used ad revenue as a necessary source of funding.
3. If it really is all that bad, I should have noticed in the shop before I bought it.
4. I really should get out more.

This entry posted in : Observations.

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