Rocking All the Way to the Bank

There's this thing I have my journalism students do during the first week of school where they bring in any magazine of their choice and cover every single ad with the same color construction paper. At first they think it's pretty fun — look ma, no work — but then they start to notice how much blue or green or red paper there is. It's pretty powerful.

The only magazines to which I subscribe are The Nation and Harper's, both of which boast an extremely low ad to content ratio. I just thumbed through the copy of The Nation sitting on my coffee table and discovered that only 11 out of the 40 pages were ads. Furthermore, it wasn't until page 14 that I found the first full-page ad. Pretty cool. The January 2008 issue of Harper's had an even lower 18 percent ad content, albeit a little more front-heavy in the distribution.

I figured my magazine collection probably wouldn't accurately reflect the quantity of advertising contained in the average American bird-cage liner, so I did a little research. According to a publishing industry website, the average magazine's ad to content ratio is 1:1, meaning that a full fifty percent of what you're paying for when you pick up a copy of Newsweek or Sports Illustrated is the privilege to be sold to someone else.

Of course, that fifty percent average takes into account magazines like The Nation and Adbusters (which contains exactly zero percent advertising). That means that somewhere there's got to be a magazine that's pretty much entirely ads! Sure enough, Vogue boasts an impressive 87 percent ad content. Somewhere a board member is very, very happy. (Then again, with a magazine like that, can you really tell the difference between the ads and the editorial content anyway?)

Today I strayed outside of my little haven of lefty news rags and thumbed through the latest Rolling Stone (which, for all that it styles itself as a lefty news rag, is no such thing). It was sort of like reading the The Nation upside down and backwards, because I don't think it was until page 15 that I actually saw one iota of non-advertising content — and that was just the table of contents! Or should I say, "contents."

All I know is that by the time I'd gotten halfway through, I felt strangely compelled to smoke, drink and then go driving on a twisty mountain road. In that order. Also, I kind of wanted to change my middle name to "Killah" but to be fair, that's probably been building for a while now.