However I'd question whether it is all bad, and some specialist magazines are at least as healthy as they were. Although readers do like ads, they don't like too many of them, so a slight change in the balance of editorial to ads can work wonders for popularity. Unfortunately, many magazine publishers have taken the easy route to success and find that copy sales and subscriptions are not enough to keep them going when ad sales fall.

Several years ago, as a free download for buyers of my book "How to Start and Produce a Magazine or Newsletter" I created an ad rates calculator which let any publisher or potential publisher show what the effects on revenue are if there are substantial discounts for series bookings, or a greater proportion of larger ads which produce less revenue than an equivalent space filled with smaller ads. If ad sales people were sent out to sell more smaller ads, some publishers might find their balance sheet improving dramatically.

Readers might be happier too, since smaller ads, as a generalization, tend to more informational rather than just boosting a brand. And happier readers will be more likely to renew their subscription.

Magazines may have to change their ways to survive, but specialist ones will survive, and in print. I for one would certainly like to see fewer meaningless ads from major companies, and more smaller ones from those who can really do something for me.

For each of the magazines above, what you're looking at the gross number of subs, multiplied it by the "list" price of a subscription—which no one has ever paid in the history of TIME or any other magazine. Likewise, "ad pages" uses the same retardo-math: The number is derived from counting up the number of pages sold by the "open rate" bullshit number that no advertiser ever pays. Subs, and ad pages, are variably priced and the numbers in this chart are not real. Not even, I should add, directionally real since you might increase the price of an ad page, sell fewer of them, but make more $$$. )Don't laugh: It happens.)

That said, yeah, duh, print is taking a pounding. But this is nothing more than a really pretty diagram, full of the sound and fury of an idiot, signifying nothing. No offense to Awl. Which I love. Carry on…

Seriously, so what if those two magazines bite the dust?

The mag biz, much like the rest of the "media" biz (which in my analysis covers mags, books, TV, movies, and web) is in the middle of a gigantic ad revenue crater. But here's the thing about advertising downturns, they end when the recession ends.

When gossip and innuendo are passing for News these days, no amount of bailing out is going to save a ship that's too big to float.

Maybe I'm wrong.

Some day we will have a "flash designer" to do these things for us! You know, in the "future."