The Magazine Illusion - what are you really buying?

Today's post is on the topic of magazines - more importantly - advertising in magazines. 

Before I begin - I love magazines. I would kill to work for a major magazine and like many women, I buy the main three every month - Glamour, Cosmopolitan and Company. Occasionally I will buy Marie Claire depending on the contents. Unfortunately I haven't got the funds to be able to afford the likes of Elle and Vogue and I tend to really only buy "trash mags" like Heat when I need to fill my lunch hour despite it being one of my firm favourites. So this isn't me bashing magazines or the magazine featured in any way.

This post will feature the magazine Glamour. Purely because it was the first one I picked up. It's a fairly old copy (October 2012, we're now on December 2012) as I like to keep two months backdated with my magazines where possible. I used to be a hoarder but then realised there wasn't much point as I never go back to them!

£2 for a magazine is cheap. It's monthly, it's packed with everything I like and I mean, look how thick it is - value for money or what?

No. In terms of actual content it's half the size of the physical object. When I was about thirteen and started buying magazines my dad posed a question to me that I have never forgotten - he asked why I bought the magazines firstly and then when I said all the positive reasons why listed above he set me an exercise. My father told me to go through my magazine and rip out all the adverts. Not the ones that were an advert on one side of the page and a feature on the other but all the "this sheet of paper is completely sponsored" pages. 

I was shocked. I didn't even realise two thirds of my magazine that I thought was so thick and full of content was all just advertising. Now, I enjoy adverts, I like looking at them, I like being sold certain products and lifestyles and I like seeing what companies do but I know some people don't and see them as consumerism taking over the world and a waste of their money. 

I've spoken to various friends and colleagues and none of them have ever done this exercise or even thought about it at all and bought magazines for much the same reasons as I do. So I thought I would do this exercise again as a blog post. Now, if you really want to get an accurate picture you can go through and remove adverts mathematically so there's not a single advert in there but for the sake of saving time and my clean up process I left the half ad/half feature pages in. 

I took out all complete adverts as well as the advertising space at the back and the promotional features. 

Example of half advert/half feature pages - the other side of the article was an advert

My pile of adverts and promotional features

Remains of the once-thick magazine

Just to get a real idea I am inserting a before and after of the thickness of the magazine below:

It is now less than half the size of the original product when you remove almost all advertising. So when you hand over your £2 for your super thick and seemingly good value for money magazine - just remember - you're paying for all those adverts. 

Of course, I will continue to purchase my favourite magazines but for the purpose of knowledge I hope this has been insightful.