The other day I came across a blog post by a fellow Bulgarian blogger delving into a pretty crazy idea – a magazine without advertisements. Sounds rather unrealistic, right? Well, you’d be a surprised! Such a magazine does exists, and it’s even on sale on Craigslist for the price of $4,447,847.53! Read on while I explain why such a dizzying number.

Designer Joseph G. Davies started a personal project he named Ad-Blocked Vogue, where he literally “blocked” all ads in the September issue of the US Vogue. He cut out all the pages with advertisements in the magazine and those he couldn’t cut, he blanked over with a fat marker. The result: out of the 902 total pages, 280 were full-pages ads and 45 double-page spreads. The image below says it all…

The price Joseph set for this one-of-a-kind publication - $4,447,847.53 - is basically the amount of money brands pay to feature their products in the print issue. So, if you want a magazine without ads, that’s the price you would have to pay because it’s exactly that money that comes from brands that makes it possible for regular people to buy a Vogue copy for just $12.

Now I was intrigued and decided to do a similar experiment with the October issue of the German Glamour.

I hadn’t paid as much attention to the ads in a magazine before, but this time having focused specifically on them I was shocked! I counted the pages containing ads and those with editorial content. Here are the results:

• 263 pages in total
• 101 full-page ads (including double-page spreads)
• 2 half-page ads

So, more or less, every second page is an ad. Another thing I noticed is that there are a lot of advertorials in the magazine and quite a few photo-shootings i.e. not much actual word content or stories.

Just as Joseph, I also cut out the pages that contained ads (an image of those you can see at the beginning of the post above). This is what the magazine looks like with and without the advertisements:

Glamour issue with ads

Glamour issue without ads

Glamour issue with ads open

Glamour issue without ads open

(Note: the Glamour edition you see above is the special Glamour Shopping Week edition that contains the addresses of all stores in Germany participating in it, so I have excluded those pages (in total 189 pages) from my counting.)

What’s the conclusion? Well, no wonder why I only read online and barely or never buy print issues. Online formats give you the freedom to ignore or skip ads, read whatever you like and as much as you like and you are not bound by the content that’s only in one print edition.

Great for readers, but what does that mean for advertisers and brands? And most importantly, what does it mean for PR?

The truth is (at least in my opinion), PR does to some extent depend on advertising. At the end of the day, it is advertisers who make those magazines available for the general public (I bought Glamour for 2,20€).

Basically, advertisers pay a lot of money, which are used by publishers to develop that editorial content, i.e. to let journalist do their job. And what is their job? Well, to a massive extent journalists deal with PR people because PR people are often the ones who supply the content and the story ideas to journalists, aiming to place their client’s name in well-known outlets. It’s all tied in together. But, and that’s a big but, with the advent of social media PR professionals were offered a variety of new direct channels to reach their audiences, meaning that they no longer require journalists as mediums to publish their stories – PR specialists can do so directly on Facebook or Pinterest or on a company blog. And this is not a mere hype or fad – as a recent post by Ketchum PR notices, blogs are taking over the online media space and I would that the online media space is taking over the print media space. Print as we know it is dying, but will adopt, I’m just not sure how exactly :P

Do you read print? How about online?

Image by Joseph G. Davis