Why pay for advertisements?

[koan]

I haven't really looked through any magasines for a long time until this afternoon when I noticed a friend's copy of Home And Garden on the table.

I noticed that the cover, showing a woman on a couch reading a copy of this issue was a rather clever way of advertising their own magasine right on the cover but was shocked after flipping through it to discover that in the first half of the book, only two facing pages contained article information. The have flipped the book so that the higher priced ads are all on the main page facing and what little magasine existed is on the left hand page. I haven't done a thorough count but I'm thinking that the ratio is about 90%advertisement.

There was some movie where people in the future had radio stations that only played ad jingles and everyone loved it. Are we heading for a future where magasines only have advertisements and they create their "image" by only allowing specific companies to advertise with them?

Perhaps soon the only writers employed by magasines will be the ones who write the company slogans.

Pablum.

They only feed us what we ask for and we sure don't demand much anymore.

[RedGlitter]

There are good publications out there but you won't find most of them in the mainstream. Without ads there'd be few mags and without us to read them there'd be no ads. But I agree with what you're saying. Vanity Fair seems to be an offender. I think the first 15 pages or so are nothing but top shelf ads.

You raise an interesting question though- shouldn't magazines decide what ads they'll accept and what their image will be? I remember writing to Jane magazine which was for 20 somethings and asked them why they ran articles on how to prevent various types of cancer and venereal diseases, and other health articles yet their magazine was paid for by cigarette ads?!