{"id":724,"date":"2011-06-03T07:31:29","date_gmt":"2011-06-03T13:31:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.curtisgibby.com\/blog\/?p=724"},"modified":"2016-05-11T06:40:58","modified_gmt":"2016-05-11T12:40:58","slug":"the-breakdown-wired-magazine-june-2011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.curtisgibby.com\/blog\/2011\/06\/the-breakdown-wired-magazine-june-2011\/","title":{"rendered":"The breakdown: WIRED magazine, June 2011"},"content":{"rendered":"

This year, I got a subscription to WIRED magazine for Christmas.\u00a0 It’s been a couple of years since I had a magazine to read every month, and I noticed something this time around that seemed indicative of a wider change in the journalism industry: more ads.\u00a0 It appeared that every other page in this magazine was advertising content rather than editorial content.\u00a0 No longer was I the consumer and the magazine the product.\u00a0 Instead, I was the product and advertisers were the consumers.<\/p>\n

By the time the May issue came in the mail, I was annoyed enough that I started ripping the all-ad pages out of the magazine and complaining about it<\/a> on Facebook: “Curtis Gibby just ripped out 10 of the first 16 pages in my new WIRED magazine because they were useless ads on both sides. Who says print journalism is dying?”\u00a0 A couple of people took notice of my post, and I thought it would be interesting to expand on the subject when the June issue rolled around.<\/p>\n

And now it’s time for a breakdown<\/a>…<\/em><\/h2>\n

<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The magazine in its wrapper, before I started ripping it apart<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It came in a little plastic bag and had a subscription card for the New Yorker behind it.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The back cover, immediately after opening the wrapper<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I immediately noticed that both sides of the back cover were actually ads. I had decided to tear out any sheet that was advertising on both sides, but I didn’t want to destroy the physical integrity of the magazine by ripping off the cover.\u00a0 Curse you, Conde Nast editors!<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The back cover – an ad<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"The<\/a>
The inside back cover – another ad<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I started by going through the whole magazine from the front cover, and counting every page as either editorial content or an ad.\u00a0 I gave the publishers the benefit of the doubt, calling anything that actually had to do with the magazine itself “content,” regardless of whether it was a boring index or a photo illustration without any actual information.\u00a0 (As long as it wasn’t actively trying to get me to purchase a Best Buy TV, I called it good.)<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The inside front cover and first page – both ads.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The first several pages were not promising — after the front cover, there were five ad pages in a row.\u00a0 In fact, I was surprised to find out that most of the first half of the magazine had an ad on every other page.\u00a0 It wasn’t until I got to the actual articles section near the back that I got several pages in a row of content without ads.<\/p>\n

One page had a vertical ad that took up a column about a third of the page size.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The single split page with both editorial and ad<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I tore out twenty sheets (ones that had ads on both sides) and collected four silly subscription cards.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The twenty ripped-out pages<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"The<\/a>
The complete magazine after the breakdown<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

tl;dr<\/h2>\n

In the end, I found that the magazine was 53.17% editorial content<\/strong> — 94.64 pages were editorial versus 83.36 pages of ads.<\/p>\n

I’ve posted a spreadsheet listing every page<\/a> at Google Docs.\u00a0 The spreadsheet also lists where I found the insert cards and specifies the cumulative percentage of editorial content.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I tear apart (literally!) the June 2011 issue of WIRED magazine to get to the bottom of how much advertising content there is versus how much actual editorial content.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[132],"tags":[134,135,136,133],"class_list":["post-724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-breakdown","tag-advertising","tag-journalism","tag-the-breakdown-2","tag-wired-magazine","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtisgibby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtisgibby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtisgibby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtisgibby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtisgibby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=724"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtisgibby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":815,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtisgibby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/724\/revisions\/815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtisgibby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtisgibby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtisgibby.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}