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dot com ad bloat



Here's an interesting article on the growing ad bloat in "new economy"
business magazines.  This trend is a great boon for the magazines: they
triple the length of each issue, selling advertising on all the additional
space; they increase the number of issues per year; they reprint past
articles in their entirety; they sell these catalogs of advertisements and
stale content to wild-eyed executives.

Good work if you can get it.

James



"Why is there so much to read? Because there are so many more ad dollars
being spent. Magazines guarantee advertisers a fixed ratio of content to ads
(often around 45 percent editorial to 55 percent advertising); as
advertisers targeting Net-savvy business people buy more space, the pubs
bulge with both more editorial and ad pages."

"So, doesn't the quality of the articles being published suffer with all
that copy that has to be churned out? Well, not if you simply rerun articles
that have appeared before. The March issue of Business 2.0 contains 10
stories that have run in their entirety in previous issues of the magazine,
reprinted word for word. The 95-page "special section" entitled "10 Driving
Principles of the New Economy" may attempt to explain the "new" economy, but
the stories themselves are not so new. The original publication dates do run
just under the story titles in the section's mini table of contents, but
it's not immediately apparent that the articles are reruns -- although
there's a hint in the fact that the stories frequently cite supporting
examples circa 1995 or 1997."

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/03/21/net_magazines/index.html