Still Glossy

Last week we discussed Steve Sailer's excellent Takimag article about advertising. He made a great point about print magazines:

Have you noticed that a remarkable number of print magazines are still around in 2017? After the crash of 2008, I expected magazine racks to be empty by now. But apparently, glossies remain a good way to make expensive stuff look glamorous.

Print magazines not only survived 2008, they multiplied. For example my old bosses at Decision Games, publishers of Strategy & Tactics,  have stubbornly expanded. In 2008 they launched World at War. They followed this up in 2010 with Modern War. Now they're launching Strategy & Tactics Quarterly.

Now Decision Games sells a war game with each magazine so their business model is slightly different than say, Cosmo's or Newsweek's.

But has the reader noticed that a copy of Newsweek looks awfully thin?

We can't speak for Cosmo. [Yeah...sure-Ed]

Other history magazines that don't offer games are still printing at the same rate with the same number of pages. Our current bosses at Sovereign Media crank out Military Heritage, Civil War, WWII, and several special issues a year.

Actually to say one outfit is a former boss and one a current boss is a bit misleading.

[You misleading? No-Ed]

All we really mean is we don't write for Decision Games anymore, don't ask [I wasn't going to -Ed] while we still write for Sovereign Media.

The economics of the business haven't changed much in the ten years since the crash. They still rely on a lot of freelancers [that's you, Will-Ed] and the rates for articles haven't changed much.

We advertise our books in those same magazines  and those rates haven't changed much either.

Actually, we thought the shuttering of Borders would strike a major blow to the print magazine business. Borders was where we discovered the above mentioned magazines, after all. Interestingly the publishers have just found other places to sell. Anyone else notice the great expansion of the magazine shelves at the supermarket?

So even after ten years the demand for print magazines seems stable. The question is why.

Sailer notices this:

Paper periodicals will likely take a huge hit in the next economic downturn when luxuries become unaffordable again, but their continued survival today suggests that, despite all the theoretical advantages of personalized onscreen advertising, there’s something still not quite right about online ads.

Perhaps the same is true for digital copy?

We wrote the lead and designed Green Hell