Magazines or Adazines?

So since I had no internet, I sat down and did a count. And then because I really was bored, I compared this to some of the UK and US magazines to see how the Australian glossies rack up adwise.

Now this wasn’t fully technical and I probably broke any number of statistical method rules, but the way I did it was basically count any full page or half page advertisement (half pages only being counted at .5) that made up the page total of the magazine. The magazines were not all from the same months, but all were from the last four months. The magazines used were:

Australian: Instyle Australia, Shop Til You Drop, Russh, Vogue Australia and Marie Claire Australia
UK – Eve, Elle, Harpers Bazaar
US – Glamour, Lucky, Marie Claire

What I found interesting was that before starting, I did a guess-timate and my guess was that around 70% of the magazines was ads. My guess was just generally based on my many years of magazine reading and that feeling you get when you first crack open a magazine and it takes ten minutes just to get to the index page.

Well, I was way out. In the Australian magazines I counted our two magazines with the highest advertisement count were Vogue Australia (45%) and Marie Claire (44%), which is still admittedly a fair bit, but far less than my original assumption.

 Russh Magazine came out best with the lowest percentage of advertisements (18%), followed by Instyle Australia with 34%

So how do we compare with UK and US magazines? Pretty well actually – Allure UK Edition contained a massive 54% of advertisements,  and Elle UK had 51% advertisements.The best performer of the UK Magazines was Eve, which only had 38% advertisements.

For the US magazines, I actually only had three on hand, but Lucky was the worst offender with 57% of the page total being dedicated to advertisements, followed by Glamour (41%) and Marie Claire (38%)

What I found most sneaky throughout this little experiment was just how many of the advertisments came towards the page total – you know the ads that fold out to be an extra page? Well, that extra page is counted in the page total.

I’m sure this is probably not statistically correct since I didnt have equal amounts of magazines in each group, but the Australian magazines came out best of all with an average of 37% of the page total dedicated to advertisments, the UK magazines an average of 46% of page total and then the US magazines with 45% of the page total.

 I would have dearly loved to have counted the Myer Emporium magazine but I actually threw it out, so if anyone’s got it, I’d be interested to hear the total number of pages devoted towards advertisements. I thought about buying one, but the fact remains: For some reason I just cannot get past the whole store-magazine-being-expected-to-pay-for-it issue.

So the question I’m now asking myself is this: am I still likely to buy Marie Claire and Vogue knowing that nearly half of the magazine is advertisements? I have to be honest and say I don’t buy Vogue that much anyway so I’m already predisposed to thinking of it being a waste of money, but I do think I will continue to buy Marie Claire. Whilst not as much of the magazine is articles as I thought (14% in case you are interested), I still do find the articles interesting, and that does play a part in my purchasing decisions. As for the other mags like Shop Til You Drop, well, lets be honest, saying I buy STYD for the articles is like trying to justify buying Playboy for the articles, it just ain’t true. Its my pre-shopping research.