Wired magazine is 56.2% fullpage ads

by ten7 • 18 years ago

34 47 18 years ago

pg2• 18 years ago

I've noticed the NYT has many more ads than it used to. My instincts tell me this is the death spasm of print. It means things are worse for the print media than even their current revenues suggest, because falling ad prices have been concealed by selling more ads. But they're going to run out of room for that soon.

DenisM3• 18 years ago

Should we brainstorm saving the poor bastards? I'll start.

I would pay for content if:

1. It is personalized to my area of interest. It should be narrow enough to avoid unrelated stuff, wide enough to cover particaulr area compeletely such that I never need to go read another source for the same area. It should be de-duped. I hate dups.

2. All references and facts are properly attributed and cited. The moment I see "scientists found that 30% of..." I cancel my subscription without hesitation.

3. Non-factual pieces (opinions) are from well-known experts. At least there should be a credibility trail behind those people.

4. Content is peer reviewed. If there is a stretch somewhere, I want to know about it.

5. Content is short and to the point. I have short attention span and not much time.

6. Conflicts of interest and biases should be apparent.

For example Hardward Business Review is doing a reasonably god job on 2, 3, 6 and somtimes 5.

HN is pretty good with #1 (except dupes which are pretty bad).

Alex39172• 18 years ago

I would never pay to read any author who described their writing as content.

Which is pretty much why I never read the paper or magazines anymore. Every time I pick one up the only thing I can think about is the fact that the articles were only written to sell advertising. Newspapers aren't designed to enlighten you, they're designed to sell dildos and tofu.

pg2• 18 years ago

Within YC we often brainstorm about the future of journalism, but it is more in the spirit of killing the existing players than saving them. History suggests that is the right way to frame the question. Companies as deeply entrenched in obsolete habits as most current print media companies tend not to survive major shifts like the arrival of the Internet.

So instead of asking "How do you fix the NYT?" I'd ask "How would you kill the NYT?" Notice how much more scope you have for new answers there. If you're trying to fix them, you're implicitly constrained to make something like a newspaper. If you're trying to kill them, all you have to do is make something their advertisers prefer; that could be practically anything.

michaelneale2• 18 years ago

7. I can get it in a paper form (or similar) that is safe to stuff in a bag and read on the beach? (and the news isn't stuff that gets out of date in a second).

I don't understand the online "magazine" concept - not sure how it translates.

I find wired nice airport/toilet reading.

robg3• 18 years ago

Haven't the classifieds collapsed as a viable revenue stream? Probably have to make that up elsewhere.

aurumaeus• 18 years ago

Absolute opposite. They're the only viable revenue stream, but most papers don't realize this, and don't focus on it.

kwamenum86• 18 years ago

The author noticed "after about a 3 month hiatus." If subscribers are not reading the magazine that is a pretty bad sign so why should we be surprised about all of the ads. I find it somewhat ironic that after 3 months of not making time to take a good look at the magazine the author is surprised that something has changed.

river_styx2• 18 years ago

I don’t have as much time as I used to, to do this, but I try to give the whole magazine a flip at least once, every month.

Blogger needs to take some time, to learn proper comma use, and then rethink this sentence.

ten73• 18 years ago

You're right, I went a little comma happy there. I fixed the sentence to read a little better.

river_styx2• 18 years ago

On second read, my comment seems a bit snarky. No offense intended.

tdavis• 18 years ago

Coincidentally, our new issue of Wired arrived today and I suggested that they weren't at risk of going under so long as at least 50% of the magazine is ads. At least until people stop buying it because of that.

ja2ke• 18 years ago

Is this news? I mean, hasn't Wired /always/ been super ad heavy?

Hey, it has! http://www.suck.com/daily/95/10/06/daily.html

"We studied issue 3.09 (the one with Arnold Schwarzenegger on its cover) and were not surprised to discover that of its 206 pages, 90 were full page ads. (If you include 1/2's, 1/4's, and pull-outs the ratio jumps to a clean 50/50 split.)"

Further analysis of Wired's ad/content ratio was done by the Magazineer in January -- http://magazineer.com/howto/26

ten73• 18 years ago

Wow, I had no idea. I guess it seemed to me that at least in the past I was reading content that I could find easily. Now it just seems like every other page is an ad and I have to struggle to find the articles.

jraines• 18 years ago

Ah, suck.com -- my favorite web 1.0 relic.

Filler was the best webcomic before webcomics were cool.

http://www.suck.com/filler/archive/all.html

adoyle• 18 years ago

Oddly enough, I was reading my copy today and was thinking that I much prefer print ads to online ads. I actually enjoy bumping into things I would not normally see. My only gripe are the ads that try to disguise themselves as editorial material and have to have the word "Advertisement" on the top of the page. Online, I ignore ads and the ones I do notice are rarely interesting.

spolsky• 18 years ago

Um, did anyone notice what month it is?

If you had a fixed advertising budget for the year, wouldn't you spend most of it in the November and December issues?

Almost every magazine and newspaper gets really fat at the end of the year.

pclark• 18 years ago

Christ why are submissions going through tiny url services?

ten73• 18 years ago

First time poster - didn't realize it was a big deal. Noted for future posts. Thanks.

anamax• 18 years ago

On the news-stands that I've checked, the more "high-end" a woman's magazine is, the greater the percentage of ad content.

sown• 18 years ago

I wonder how long it's going to be before I start seeing ads in World of Warcraft or Eve... Never I hope...

thomasswift• 18 years ago

not really surprised here, back in the day when it was a 1/4" thick, I use to rip out all the ads that were front and back, then start reading it.

Create• 18 years ago

So what we have in the first place is major corporations which are parts of even bigger conglomerates. Now, like any other corporation, they have a product which they sell to a market. The market is advertisers -- that is, other businesses. What keeps the media functioning is not the audience. They make money from their advertisers. And remember, we're talking about the elite media. So they're trying to sell a good product, a product which raises advertising rates. And ask your friends in the advertising industry. That means that they want to adjust their audience to the more elite and affluent audience. That raises advertising rates. So what you have is institutions, corporations, big corporations, that are selling relatively privileged audiences to other businesses.

Well, what point of view would you expect to come out of this? I mean without any further assumptions, what you'd predict is that what comes out is a picture of the world, a perception of the world, that satisfies the needs and the interests and the perceptions of the sellers, the buyers and the product.

Now there are many other factors that press in the same direction. If people try to enter the system who don't have that point of view they're likely to be excluded somewhere along the way. After all, no institution is going to happily design a mechanism to self-destruct. It's not the way institutions function. So they'll work to exclude or marginalize or eliminate dissenting voices or alternative perspectives and so on because they're dysfunctional, they're dysfunctional to the institution itself.

http://www.archive.org/details/NoamChomskyNoamChomskyManufac...

ivankirigin• 18 years ago

Here's a pic of mine of the pages with ads on both sites in wired ripped out: http://flickr.com/photos/ikirigin/2097211221/

I'd like to do this with a scalpel to compare the height.

akd• 18 years ago

In other news, Vogue magazine is 91% fullpage ads.

Wired magazine is 56.2% fullpage ads

Related Stories