Your newsweekly bashing asideâ€"you bastards!â€"those numbers don't make any sense. I have no doubt that they came from the MPA, but come on: TIME with $320 million in circ revenue in 2002 and $160 million in ad revenue! That's adorable. If that were true, all of TIME's reporters and writers and editors would be driving around in chauffeured limos, like, well, like Conde guys.
For each of the magazines above, what you're looking at the gross number of subs, multiplied it by the "list" price of a subscriptionâ€"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 $$$. )Don't laugh: It happens.)
That said, yeah, duh, print is taking a pounding. But this is nothing more than a really pretty diagram, full of the sound and fury of an idiot, signifying nothing. No offense to Awl. Which I love. Carry on...
On A Graphic History of Magazine Income Over the Last Decade
Your newsweekly bashing asideâ€"you bastards!â€"those numbers don't make any sense. I have no doubt that they came from the MPA, but come on: TIME with $320 million in circ revenue in 2002 and $160 million in ad revenue! That's adorable. If that were true, all of TIME's reporters and writers and editors would be driving around in chauffeured limos, like, well, like Conde guys.
For each of the magazines above, what you're looking at the gross number of subs, multiplied it by the "list" price of a subscriptionâ€"which no one has ever paid in the history of TIME or any other magazine. Likewise, "ad pages" uses the same retardo-math: The number is derived from counting up the number of pages sold by the "open rate" bullshit number that no advertiser ever pays. Subs, and ad pages, are variably priced and the numbers in this chart are not real. Not even, I should add, directionally real since you might increase the price of an ad page, sell fewer of them, but make more $$$. )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...