The real measure of magazines

The online world has received a fair amount of grief lately for being hard to measure. (David Churbuck points out one such study that makes this point and he in turn makes an appropriate criticism of this attitude. Click here.) And some of the criticism is fair. (Here's an interesting criticism of how "views" are measure online from Silicon Valley Insider. Click here.)

However, none of what the online world is going through comes close to what magazines go through. (And I am not even going to touch newspapers and TV/radio.)

Today paidContent.org points out that magazine "rate card reported ad revenue" is down for Q1 by 1.2 percent from the same period last year. The fact that it's down is not a surprise. But I am certain this stat is way off. That's simply because no one pays rate card. And nobody's done that for 10 to 15 years. For the longest time the health of the magazine industry has been measured by ad pages. The New York Times measures (celebrates?) this every Monday morning in its business pages. While it's hard to measure true revenue the measurement of ad pages is absolutely meaningless since each publication charges different rates year to year (mostly less) and the rates vary from publication to publication.

I am not sure I know of a better way to measure this since no one is every going to fess up to what their real rates are but it does point out that using page count only masks an even bigger problem.