While the increase from$2.50 to$3.50 in cover price over the decade is substantial in percentage terms,it reflects the inherent price sensitivity magazines encounter on the newsstand.The increase in cover price can be ascribed to three factors:inflation,the increase in manufacturing and distribution costs,and competition on the newsstand.Moreover,it is clear that the American magazine-reading public is significantly price-resistant when dealing with the purchase of periodicals.
The best way to examine the increase in advertising rates,which during the 1990s increased from$2,591 to$3,740,is to consider the growth of the median cpm,which is derived from dividing a magazine's page rate by its circulation.In rising from$32 to$42,the cpm reflects not only inflation and a boom economy in the 1990s,but also an increase in“niching”of the magazine industry.The latter reason rests on the fact that the more targeted the audience(and its greater propensity to consume),the greater is a magazine's ability to charge advertisers a higher page rate and therefore a higher cpm.
·Subject Matter
A last area of investigation is the possible relationship between economic factors affecting magazines and magazine categories based on subject matter.Using a developed categorization scheme,The magazines in the samples were originally categorized by grouping the 75 categories used in the SRDS directory into nine clusters based on a broadly defined commonality of subject matter.it is noteworthy that the two largest categories in both 2000 and 1990,Sports/Hobbies(38.7 percent and 32.0 percent,respectively)and Travel/Regional(15.0 percent and 19.3 percent,respectively)account for over half of the entire population of consumer magazines.The 2000 data show that a smaller but nonetheless significant category,Business/Finance,has decreased its share of the total by almost 50 percent.On the other hand,the Sports/Hobbies category saw a marked 20 percent increase during the decade.
While somewhat speculative in nature,a number of sociocultural inferences might be drawn from the results of the analysis of relating economic factors and other sociological factors to subject matter.For example,it is clear that rising levels of education and affluence were accompanied by a concomitant increase in leisure during the 1990s.If one holds that magazines are a unique marker of the social reality of their time,it should come as no surprise that sports-related and travel/regional publications prospered during this period.More problematical,however,is that a conventional view of the“go-go”1990s would be at a loss to explain the decreasing share of business/finance magazines.It is possible that a further time-phased analysis would show a marked expansion of this category through 1998,but then a severe decrease thereafter with the economic contraction that originated with the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the folding of many publications celebrating the New Economy.
Conclusion
It is clear that the pressures of economic business parameters continue to be an important determinant in shaping the U.S.consumer magazine industry.By comparing the results of two quantitative studies that employ the same research methodology,this study addresses some of those economic factors affecting the publishing industry,as well as a number of related questions,in a historical context.It can be concluded that a number of the defining business parameters(e.g.,levels of circulation,cover price,advertising rates,cpms,etc.)have undergone significant change in the last decade.Indeed,the median cover price and ad rate and have increased.These changes indicate the periodical market's reaction to the varied economic pressures of cost management and the optimization of revenue within the market conditions of the 1990s.Moreover,these forces may also serve to illuminate a number of the prevailing sociocultural dimensions of contemporary America,from the declining median number of issues per year to the rise in niched,gender-related magazine categories.Most importantly,these industry trends,spurred by diverse market changes,reflect-perhaps speculatively-the ways in which magazines may mirror the cultural reality of the times in which they are produced.
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