I love magazines. I was just reminded of this yesterday, to my great delight. I returned home after a long day of being an 18-24 year old working student to find on the floor of my apartment, which is small because I’d rather spend money on things than housing, a magazine just for me! It was Jane, and I say just for me because, well, that’s the beauty of magazines. They really are just for you. Any demographic, any interest, any obsession can be satisfied with a magazine. Religiously, I read Seventeen at 13, Cosmopolitan at 17, and now I read Jane. Someone out there knows me well enough to make new magazines for me as I outgrow my old favorites. Thanks Hearst and Conde Nast!
Every now and then I come across an “Is this the end of the magazine?” type article (usually written in a newspaper; those guys are always trying to bring everyone down with them). I usually just laugh it off. The most likely entity to blame for the demise of the magazine is the Internet, but I have never bought this for a few reasons, which I base entirely on my own feelings. First, reading a newspaper article on the screen is doable. But I am not going to sit there and read a long feature story at my computer. It hurts my eyes. Second, the advertising online is no comparison to the often beautiful print advertising in magazines. The high end retailers who buy space in Vogue don’t buy space on Vogue’s Web site. And can you imaging pop-up ads trying to bring traffic to the Vogue Web site? FLASH FLASH FLASH (three young girls faces appear with radio buttons underneath): Which Page Six veteran and New York socialite threatens to kick Paris Hilton off her celebutante pedestal? Guess correctly and you could win a free Fendi handbag!!! Or perhaps your printer would automatically produce subscription renewal forms and spit them out at your feet.
Naw, magazines are cool the way they are. The Internet will never kill them. Marketing research will split, stretch and splice them into extremely targeted advertising containers, but they will always remain. They’ll be at the airport when your flight is delayed. They’ll be at the grocery store when your urge to hear about Ashlee Simpson’s disastrous weekend overwhelms you and you grab an Us Weekly. They’ll be in the dentist’s office so you can read the Time war coverage, which is more painful than the medical procedure you are about to endure. The magazine is your friend.
So why this glossy page love fest? I just happened to run across a story in Advertising Age about eBay vendors selling year subscriptions to magazines for a penny. Ha! It’s the classic big problems for the magazine article with a new twist. See, I never worried about the future of the magazine, but I have worried about the future of the subscription.
You see, I used to be in the subscription business; throughout the second half of high school, I had a very lucrative job as a telemarketer selling magazine extensions. Extensions are different than renewals, because you sell them to people whose magazines are not going to expire any time soon. You simply tack on a few years under the pretense that it will save them money because “subscription rates are going up.” We charged some pretty inflated prices for these and people gobbled them up. It’s amazing how many people will give their credit card number to a total stranger to buy something they already have. I wasn’t really proud of what I was doing, but I made a lot of money and nothing was illegal. Eventually, though, my conscience got the better of me and I quit.
Luckily this happened before the National Do Not Call Registry became available. After that, getting good call lists became difficult, and I wondered how the subscription agents I used to work with were coping.
Apparently they went to eBay. At the time of this writing, there were 30,469 magazine subscriptions available on eBay. Sure enough, some of the listings were as low as a penny; mostly for single issues. I saw some actual subscriptions, like three years of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance Magazine, going for 97 cents, with a $10 shipping and handling fee. Trust me, it doesn’t cost that much to ship the magazine to your house. That money goes to the middle man. They’ve just found a new way to inflate the price.
I guess this is the dirty little secret about magazines. They don’t really make very much money off their subscriptions, so they don’t hold a lot of value to the publisher. But they need the subscribers to pump up their circulation numbers to sell to the advertisers, which is where the big bucks are. What this means is that names, addresses and other personal information gets sold to private firms who aim to sell more stuff. Or, potentially shady middle men gain this information from you by appealing to your lust for dirt cheap products.
The moral of the story is that magazines are wonderful, fun, entertaining and informative. It’s fun to have something you can flip through backward on the coffee table. And while it is a lot cheaper and easier to have those mags delivered to your home, just remember that you get what you pay for. If the price seems too high or too low, you might be dealing with a third, or even fourth, party salesman. While they’re the most annoying part of an otherwise perfect medium, those little subscription postcards stuck between the pages are really the safest way to go. Fill it out, send it in, and write “Do not share my personal information” on the card too.

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