ConcertinaChap wrote:Interesting how the page count goes rocketing up from the beginning of 1992. Is that increased editorial, advertising or both? (Just curious here, ignore the question if the answer requires any research at all).
One of the reasons I built out the stats (
mu:zines stats page) is just for these kinds of things - it's useful to illustrate trends, see when particular topics (eg MIDI, Sampling) began and where their peak was, and so on. Obviously you can go to the nth degree of providing stats and reporting features and not that many people will care so I'm not trying to do everything, other than illustrate and extract some interesting takeaways.
Obviously, the PTB will have more definite and informed answers, but usually page counts are in line with advertising spend, which is a reflection on the state of the industry at the time - more sales/profits in the MI sector means higher advertising budgets, and more advertising means larger mags, which can then pay for increased editorial content to balance it out.
(Of course, different mags vary in editorial to ad ratios - some mags have a higher proportion of ads to editorial - this is one of those stats that would be interesting to trend and compare over time, but it's a little tricky to do for various reasons. It's on my improvements feature list, but not really a high priority...).
Usually, at least for a mag like SOS, the ad ratios are probably fairly constant, despite the changing page counts - at least that's the way the mag feels, to me - so the higher page counts are contributed both by ads and editorial, it's not generally one over the other. Being responsible for balancing that stuff I can imagine isn't easy - I'm sure Ian can weigh in with some authority there...
