How About $20 for a Year–Will You Buy Time Magazine for That? How about a Free Laser Level Too?

I got a solicitation from Time magazine in the mail at the cafe this morning. The regular newsstand price, it trumpeted, was $252 per year for 56 issues. The offer was a year of Time for twenty bucks. Oh, and if I sent back the card with payment, they’d send me an LED level, and extend the subscription for another eight months. WOW!

This leads me to the story posted by Jim Romanesko, from Women’s Wear Daily. The headline says it all: Magazine Circulation falls in Half. Now, the publishers are pointing out that competitors’ sales fell more than theirs, and even the term ‘flat is the new up,’ is out. Now it’s more like ‘well things are bad but they are worse for the other guys.’

I always felt that the newsstand game was a loser’s proposition. At Transitions Abroad, a travel magazine that was once published in Amherst, I served as Managing Editor and worked with a newsstand company to help sell it on newsstands.

We succeeded in getting the magazine onto every Barnes and Noble in the US. That cost us about $3500, which they conveniently took out of future newsstand sales. Then the company would return about 55 percent of the issues that didn’t sell, and they would take about six months to pay us for the other 45 percent that did actually sell. The cover price was $4.95 but they paid us half of that. In the end, nobody made any money and all we got was the tepid satisfaction of seeing the issues on the shelves of our local Barnes and Noble store in Hadley.

The experts say it’s high gas prices, fewer supermarket trips, and less disposable income. Magazine publishers hope it is these reasons, and not a sea change in how people consume media…but I think that the latter is ultimately the reason. And this doesn’t bode well for the future of magazines.