I've just received an e-mail from Sen Wong, who poses an interesting question:
What I'd most like to know, and perhaps you can enlighten
me, is how the dive magazine industry works as a business
model. Does the majority of revenue come from advertising
and to what extent does subscription fees contribute to
turning a profit?
This is quite a general question, but an interesting one in that no magazine can ever hope to survive without attracting advertising revenue. Magazines also rely on the revenue from subscriptions - useful in that you can predict with some degree of certainly that a set amount of income will be received over the coming months. New-stand sales also play their part, although to what extent will depend on the business model adopted by the owner of the magazine, whether this be an individual, or a group that might contain several titles.
Once again, harsh reality time - the owners of a magazine owned by a media group are only interested in one thing - $.
They couldn't really care whether you are reading about diving or fluffy kittens - what matters to them is the profit margin. This should not be any surprise, a magazine is a business, and businesses survive to make $ to provide an income to those who have a stake in it.
However, there is a variance in the ethical stance editorial teams take. Are they the servants of advertising departments, or do they distance themselves away from their influence?
Here's an example - I'll let you make up your own mind:
Scuba Diving, "the magazine divers trust," has a website where you can receive e-mail updates. I opted a few months ago for, "Depth-Finder: The email newsletter for active divers, with dive news, vacation deals, on-line exclusives and more."
A couple of days ago I received Download scuba_diving_email_news.doc full of "news" of an offer for Puerto Rico with what might appear to be reliable (remember, divers 'trust' them) editorial about some of the dive sites you will find there.
If you check out the contents page of the site you'll find the clients page where you can download a pdf with all the advertising rates in it.
Here you'll find out why you do all those "diver surveys," it's so you can be broken down into statistics for advertisers. And as for costs? Well, that e-mail with its 'advertorial' cost Puerto Rico $15K and it went out to 50,000 subscribers.
And here's a thing, on their web site you can "buy" the "Destination of the month" for $10K. If I were rich and mischievous, I'd pay for a feature on next door's fish pond.
So to the question about advertising and subscriptions - I guess you can make your own mind up on that one.
Keep Writing....
Brendan
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