

Wired magazine is 56.2% fullpage ads - ten7
http://cli.gs/TTbLLT

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ja2ke
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>

~~~
jraines
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>

------
pg
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.

~~~
DenisM
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).

~~~
pg
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.

~~~
Alex3917
"Within YC we often brainstorm about the future of journalism"

There's probably a good mailing list on this topic. It seems like all the most
intelligent discussion on the net takes place on secret mailing lists. The
problem is that to find out where this discussion is taking place you'd really
have to email a bunch of wonkish j-school types.

(And if anyone knows where people are discussing this, send me a note.)

~~~
brandnewlow
As a j-school graduate, I can promise you not much of interest is being said
on the topic there.

Newspapers, according to my former classmates working at them and people I
meet at industry events, seem to still be run by people over 45, who for the
most part think they'll be able to sneak out the backdoor just before the
whole thing falls apart.

As I said in another thread, I'm here in Chicago trying to figure out how to
kill off the local papers. After months wasted spent working on features and
design and stuff that doesn't really matter if you don't have a plan, I've
started calling up companies that advertise in local neighborhood papers and
meeting with them. Met with three on Thursday. I'm making this up as I go
along but here's what I more or less was asking:

1\. Who are you trying to reach? 2\. How are you doing it now? 3\. What works
well about that approach? 4\. What's not working well for you?

Pretty basic stuff, right?

Here's what I'm learning so far:

1\. Small neighborhood businesses (think of 37Signals Italian restaurant
analogy) are advertising in weekly neighborhood papers like this one:
<http://www.hpherald.com/>

They're paying about $250-300 for a 4 inch square ad that runs in the paper
and on the web....which is a static PDF (!) that gets updated once a week. A
back of napkin calculation following a look through that paper leads me to
believe they're selling 8-12k in ads in it each week.

The businesses tell me this tool is prohibitively expensive and don't like
that you can't measure its results.

Now, I asked them what they'd rather have, and they tried to pitch me on some
kind of online coupon setup, where people could print off coupons and the
businesses pay me each month based on how many coupons they tally up. This
seems like a suckers game.

But a few ideas I'm toying with that could be better for them:

1\. A daily neighborhood e-mail. They would be paying to reach X inboxes and
could measure click-thru's using e-mail tools. Each e-mail would have a short
article on something cool in the neighborhood, a la Daily Candy and extensive
upcoming event listings (more on that below). Once you get enough of a
subscriber base, then you start publishing the content to the web as well to
rack in the pageviews and let readers connect.

2\. Stepping in as their go-to guy to manage their adwords/CPC campaigns. This
would be a lot less fun, but is a direction worth considering. Some of these
little restaurants could be well served from getting listed high for certain
searches and getting optimized on Google Maps, for example.

Other observation that I'm still trying to make sense of:

The people I'm meeting with say they'd like a place to find neighborhood
events.

As a guy who hangs out on Hacker News, I am aware of going.com, eventful.com,
upcoming, craigslist and all manner of event sites. Yelp, The Onions new
decider.com site, all sorts of people are doing them.

And yet these advertisers had never heard of any of them and the people at the
community groups said they wanted a decent online neighborhood calendar.

Which got me thinking that maybe a Garysguide.org-style events site for
neighborhood events could play well. Start with just a few neighborhoods with
loud identities and own them, get known as the place to go to see what's
happening in those hoods. Perhaps this would be the web-half of the daily
newsletter.

Anyway, the future of journalism conversation is fascinating. I'd be
interested in any suggestions or observations from the peanut gallery on here.
As I said, I'm making this up as I go along. A network of cheap, scalable,
interesting neighborhood event + news sites seems like something that might be
attractive if you can pull in the local eyeballs.

Thoughts?

As for Wired's advertising/editorial ratio, FWIW I just asked my friends
working at magazines about it and they say that the ideal ratio is 40% ads and
60% editorial. I'm looking around online for some backup on that front and not
finding much to be honest, but that's what they're teaching at j-school on the
subject. So Wired's probably hurting if they're over 50% ads.

~~~
bootload
_"... As I said in another thread, I'm here in Chicago trying to figure out
how to kill off the local papers. ..."_

A good description of <http://www.everyblock.com/>

~~~
brandnewlow
Mentioned below!

~~~
bootload
_"... A good description of<http://www.everyblock.com/> ... Mentioned below!
..."_

Thanks, didn't see that.

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adoyle
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.

------
Create
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...](http://www.archive.org/details/NoamChomskyNoamChomskyManufacturingConsent_0)

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spolsky
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.

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tdavis
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.

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ivankirigin
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.

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river_styx
_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.

~~~
ten7
You're right, I went a little comma happy there. I fixed the sentence to read
a little better.

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

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

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kwamenum86
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.

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thomasswift
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.

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

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pclark
Christ why are submissions going through tiny url services?

~~~
ten7
First time poster - didn't realize it was a big deal. Noted for future posts.
Thanks.

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

