2004 Annual Report - Magazine Economics

When looking at advertising success of any genre or any magazine, for that matter, ad pages are probably a better measure than ad dollars, particularly when using the Publishers Information Bureau ad figures. Bureau ad dollar figures are notoriously unreliable.

They are determined by counting the pages that appear in the magazines and then multiplying that number by the ad rates on the magazines' rate cards. The problem? Rate card figures, while official, are usually incorrect and overstated. Discounts are often offered to advertisers to entice them to buy pages.

Thus the total figures for ad dollars are generally off, but they are probably overstated across the board (that is, there is no reason to think that the figures for pop culture magazines are any more inflated than those for news magazines). More to the point, they are the best figures available.