My, my, Wired magazine's looking thin these days. Only a month or so ago I remember looking at a big fat dollop of paper, all health and bouncy. Today, however, when I went to get my post my first thought went something along the lines of "Wow, this feels really lightweight".
You might almost say it was gaunt.
The next thing that popped into my brain was "why?".
Knowing the way the magazine industry works, with lead times of around three or four months, I had a little theory: the January issue of Wired was put together in September or October - in other words after the financial crisis. Was it the victim of the credit crunch?
Turns out that, yes, there does seem to be a significantly lower proportion of ads in the latest issue - in fact, the numbers are down across the board. Here's my quick count of pages:
December: 101 pages of editorial, 118 pages of advertising (a 46/54 split)
January: 84 pages of editorial and just 35 pages of ads (a 70/30 split)
Maybe, I thought, it was just a blip. After all, December's the Christmas month and advertisers love getting their gift ideas out there - perhaps it was a bumper issue, with a far higher ad count than normal. Well, I went back to the October issue to compare my results and found that with 100 pages of editorial and 116 pages of advertising, October was almost exactly the same as December.
Now, fewer ads obviously makes for a better experience as a reader. None of those pesky promotions getting in my way, and I get the feeling of more content too (although, in fact, there is less of it overall since the page count is lower). But can the magazine support its editorial staff on such a count?
With such drastic loss of weight in such as short time, could Wired be ready for death watch? Unlikely: a big name like that, backed by publisher Conde Nast, will probably survive the recession. But this radical reduction in income is bound to have knock-on effects at Wired HQ. And what does it mean for the new UK edition of Wired, which is set to launch in April?
We demand to know!
