WIRED Magazine is 56.2% fullpage ads
November 22nd, 2008
uncategorized
I received the December 2008 issue of WIRED magazine in the mail today. Yes, I’m a subscriber. Not because it’s the right thing to do (I get all of my tech news from the web) but because I like to flip through an actual magazine and read the articles. I don’t have as much time as I used to, but I do try to give the whole magazine a flip at least once every month. Now, I skipped flipping through the last few months, so after about a 3 month hiatus, I picked up today’s delivery and gave it a once over.
WTF? Where did all the artcles go? Where was the clever commentary? Where were the gadgets of tomorrow I was looking to find? And WTF is all this advertising?? It seems that in the past few months, WIRED Magazine went from respected geek reading material to advertising super-bitch. So I wanted to see exactly how much advertising was in this latest issue. I sat down in my living room and ripped out every single page of the magazine. I sorted them into three piles:
- pages that have ads on both sides
- pages with ads on only one side
- pages with no ads anywhere
The results didn’t surprise me that much. Of the 120 physical pages that I pulled out of the magazine, 28 of them had zero advertising on them, 43 had advertising on BOTH sides and 49 had adverstising on one side and “content” on the other. And by “content” I mean something that wasn’t trying to sell me the latest version of Office, or a great James Bond watch, or whatever. It was either one of those articles I was looking for, or a table of contents for the magazine, or credits, or even a photo of a gadget propped up against a steel number.
And if you do the math, it turns out that the December 2008 WIRED magazine is:
- 43.8% “content”
- 56.2% advertising
I guess the only thing I’m wondering now is: why?
29 Responses
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Wow, thanks for the doing this. I contemplated doing this on my whole collection of back issues.
Occasionally, I’ll pull out a back issue from 6 or 7 years ago and the ratio of content:advertising is probably about the same. (Remember the Microsoft anti-trust issue? That story was probably 20 or 30 pages long!) The difference is that the mag at that time was probably 2 or 3 times as thick, and including much more worthwhile content. Emphasis on worthwhile.
This is why I’m not a subscriber anymore.
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I just picked up Wired a few days ago and noticed the same thing.
Same with Computer Shopper. I hate especially those thicker ads that make it harder to flip through each page.
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someone should do this for wired historically and see if it correlates to the stockmarket.
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Ha! That’s a good idea! Wish I had the time to do that. Plus, where would we find someone to donate their whole collection to be ripped to shreds?
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Fishy5 November 22, 2008 at 7:50 pm
I was a subscriber for 2-3 years and would donate my collection. I would not actually do it myself or pay for postage, however.
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Wired hasn’t been worth reading since Louis and Jane sold it to Conde Nasty.
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This is usual for the December issue of Wired. It fills up with more ads for the holiday season.
Other times of year are still bad, but not quite so much.
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Can anyone name what some of these ads are? Were they actually effective? There’s so many now that they blur together, I can’t remember a single one that I’ve seen in a print magazine lately.
It seems like even Smithsonian Magazine has more ads now. It’s not good, advertising has a purpose but maybe it’s getting a little extreme. As a rule, there should be more show than commercials and more magazine content than ads.
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Consider yourself lucky. Don’t even bother trying to find content in GQ.
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But that’s because you don’t pay for Wired or Computer Shopper. 90% of their income is from ads. Your money hardly pays the distribution to newsstands, maybe the cost of the paper.
If there’s some good read, I’m happy to pay some. I don’t care how many _extra_ ads they need to put in to support the business: all that research, good journalists, editors, artists etc.
Call me names, but I even like beautiful print ads. Especially when I want to buy computer stuff, I don’t mind computer ads at all.
There’s a reason why quality content is vanishing out of business. Because we’re not happy to pay for it, we don’t accept ads either. We created this credit card mess… And we are creating this free content mess too… Free as in free beer, and free as in ads-free.
There will soon be a time, when we have to actually pay for quality content. Be it music, film or text. Or live with ad sponsored content, or live with free quality. We can’t just have it all.
In-depth coverage of an interesting story is bloody expensive, and somehow, somebody must pay for it, because there’s hardly any place left to steal it from, dear blog industry.
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“why?”, you ask? Because they make more money from advertising than from content (which actually costs them money)
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Agreed
I just got the same issues and it was loaded with ads and had very little content.
I was not sure if I was reading wired or maxim.
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[...] to love Wired Magazine. I’d pore over it at Barnes and Noble every trip. And then what? This: half their magazine is now advertising. What [...]
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Yardboy November 23, 2008 at 11:20 am
Why? Because an annual subscription only costs $12 and all of the content is available for free online. I’ve noticed the same thing over the last year or two – arguably not to the detail you have presented
– but have let it go because I know I didn’t waste much on the subscription and I understand that’s how they make their money. It’s still a hundred-ish pages of fairly decent content that works great for bathroom reading. -
I’m sorry, but the problem isn’t specifically in the last few months- the magazine has largely been this way since 2001. It’s just gotten progressively worse for this.
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I have a subscription, but I haven’t read an issue in several months. Not only is the massive amount of advertising annoying, the articles seem shallower and less interesting than the past.
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Bob Bobmore November 23, 2008 at 11:43 am
Dude, Wired is only $10 a year.
They have to write, layout, print, and mail each issue to you and you’re paying only 83 cents a month.
Now the advertising ratio isn’t too much of a surprise, is it?
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You think they are bad, go get a Maxim Magazine and see how much is in that.
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1&1 ads are sometimes like 10 pages long themselves. When ads > content, dump it. I dumped them 3 years ago. Leaf through it in Barnes and Noble, but don’t buy.
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Well, they need to balance the cost of producing and distributing the magazine with subscriptions and ads. Perhaps subscription dollars are down.
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after 5 years of subscription ( i was pretty happy when it went downt o 12$ a year), I quit even forking up the 12$ because of the ads. it felt like a good friend going down the drug lane and nothing i could do about it except leave him.
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I’m not in the “print media” business. So, take this with a grain of salt.
My understanding is that at 50% advertizing, Wired isn’t making money. It’s probably losing money. I’m told that 25% content to 75% advertizing in almost all forms of print media is where the publisher just begins to make money.
I also read that 25% advertizing to 75% content is the maximum amount of advertizing that online users will tolerate before abandoning an online site because of too much advertizing.
In any case, I abandoned print media long ago. I get news and information from the web. Yes, I use AdBlock Plus and FlashBlock and CustomizeGoggle Firefox add-ons.
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$12 a year? You can’t complain! Over here it costs about £60 (about $90). Even with a forest of adverts I’d be happy to pay $12.
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Almost all the computer mags I read in library (I don’t buy those crap
) are not vary from this result. I wonder why people buy them. -
Justin December 20, 2008 at 8:40 pm
Well, I just received the latest issue of Wired. There are almost NO ads in it (relative to the past). That’s not a good thing.
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Technetos January 30, 2009 at 5:27 pm
This is why I’m glad I got mine for free. I worked at an electronics store and they let me keep the old issues of magazines.
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I used to subscribe to Wired.
I quit after six months, just for this reason. I have no idea why I should pay to get a packet of advertisements.This would have never worked many years ago when the magazine started.
Boo, Wired. For shame. They lost a customer in me because of the irrelevant adverts
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I’ve had a subscription to WIRED since the price went to $12/year, and have continued to renew at $12, although I’ve become more disgusted at the editorial direction and junk-content.
In my opinion, the more recent great make-over sucks big-time legibility and content-wise, although there –may– be a recent turn for the better in the quality if not quantity of editorial content.
Last summer I turned up about 10 issues of Wired from 1996-98 that I had not even opened …and began reading them.
Every issue is 100-percent more quality content and generally more legible than the last 8 years or so, at least.
Well-written in-depth articles often ran 15+ pages, in well-inked readable non-micro type sizes (with the occasional submergence against background colorschemes, as is still (more?) often the case.)
I wonder if the current staff actually READS the hardcopy. Compare side-by-side a 90’s issue with a current one, to see what I mean.June 1997 has 184 9â€x10 3/4†pages, June 2009 has 150 8â€x10 7/8†pages.
I have no problem with ads as long as ads and gear-fluff (which are essentially ads) do not replace quality editorial content.
Conde’ seems to have missed the insight that quality content attracts/increases readership (and subscribers), which numbers attract advertisers.Wired has gone downhill especially after it was sold to Conde-Nast, and while I can’t blame the originators for moving on from their excellent efforts, I continue to hope persons of their ilk will surface to run WIRED.
Conde-Nast seems to be way out of its league re: the subject matter, journalism seems to have been curtailed for “gear†in a People-mag quick-read-content model.Conde’ would be better off if they split today’s WIRED in half: put the “letters/rants†and the back half into WIRED, and the rest into a mag called CRAP.
I subscribe to WIRED* for exactly the same reason as you. Always hoping for deeper, long-form reporting that I can’t get from the web.
Rarely does that happen.
(* Ever since we moved offices, I haven’t received an issue, ~3 months now. Can’t say I miss it too much…)