I was at Chapters today flipping through a magazine when it occurred to me how many advertisements were in it. After looking in a couple others, even big name ones, there were still a huge number of ads. Let’s do the math, here. The first magazine I was looking at was only a short thing, 55 pages or so. I counted it up and there were around 20 full page ads, plus some extra pages covered with smaller ads, plus a couple of ’side bar’ ads. That’s insane. So, an already overpriced $6.50 CND magazine is at least 35% advertisements, along with some extra added in ads and a few articles with one of those graphic things covering one and a half pages that leaves only half of a page of text. Clearly this would need to have some really amazing articles to make it worth buying. Of course, this is and has always been a trend with the magazine industry. People like their articles all jazzed up with images and little drawings and such. And, as they say, money doesn’t grow on trees. Making a mag is a costly investment, and it takes a lot of these ads to keep costs down. Still, it isn’t hard to believe that sometimes publishers decide to put in more than necessary to make a few extra bucks. Now, though, with blogs, RSS feeds and sites like Digg gaining in popularity every day, the internet may be cutting into magazine’s profits more than you think.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a great felling about getting the newest issue of your favorite read in the mail, sitting down in a comfy chair with a glass of your beverage of choice and just reading it, but the internet offers up hundreds of possibilities that magazines will never be able to pull off. Blogs, for instance. Blogs are one of the latest internet trends. Everyone seems to have a blog, and I love it. It’s like being able to open the latest issue of Everything You Care About and it has articles written by the most important people your world: your friends and family. Events and stories can be read from a new perspective and you feel so connected. This brings me to my next point. As I mentioned before, RSS feeds are a big part of the “Web 2.0″ goal. RSS, for those who don’t know, is basically a script that allows sites to say “Look, something is new on our site.” Once a reader of the site subscribes to the RSS feed, either using a browser like Firefox or a feed reader like Google Reader, as soon as the site updates the program reading the feed will ‘tell’ you that there is new content. Think of it like the news boy running up to your front door every so often and saying “Big news! Here’s the latest article!” Well, except less intrusive and annoying. Websites are also great because it is so easy to filter what you want to read about. While you might buy a music magazine from a book store, on the internet you can narrow down your search so far as to a site that only posts news about a specific band or album. It is just a lot more convenient in most cases.

Here’s the way I see it: the future of magazines, to a lesser extent, may become like theatre movies. Sometimes it’s a treat but often an unnecessary hassle that is slowly becoming obsolete and less popular. I don’t want magazines to die, that’s far from my point. It is just that the internet offers up a whole new way of finding things out. It’s quick, easy to use, less ad oriented and is often see from a more personal perspective. Magazines are kind of like a pre-internet sort of thing; they’re both very style based, but it is all about the content in the end. That’s the way it always should be. Hopefully we’ll start to see magazines make an effort to take advantage of all the magazine pros as well as all the internet’s pluses. A prime example is Wired. With staff blogs and constant news updates you get the benefit of the staff’s write ups but delivered daily, along with a monthly mag with many more exclusive articles. It probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise that a tech magazine is one of the first to really integrate both websites and articles into each other, but hopefully we’ll start to see more and more magazines following in their footsteps. In the end, it is all about content, pixels or print. Or, preferably, pixels and print.

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