So I was looking (or at least trying to look) through GQ earlier and getting incredibly annoyed by the fact that I couldn't find the table of contents. I think it literally took me like a minute to flip back and forth through that odyssey of ads. (There are 36 pages of ads to search through before finally reaching the table of contents. I just counted.) I know a minute doesn't sound like much, but you're all of the same impatient, information-hungry generation as me, so you know how that seems like forever.
Then I remembered that post on kottke about Google's new, free, faster DNS service. Why are they putting out a free DNS service? Because apparently speed matters so much, that slowing down the amount of time it takes for the search page to load from .4 to .9 seconds caused a 20% drop in traffic. For half a second. That's nuts!
But it made me wonder if the same thing stands for magazines (pun not intended). When I'm waiting in the check-out counter, I browse the magazines, and if they look interesting, sometimes I buy one (though it has to look pretty good to justify $5--yes, I know that is a blasphemous thing to say in this class). I think if I were the type of person to browse GQ in the checkout line, and it took me that long to even find the table of contents, I would give up. If half the time I flip open the magazine, I get someone selling me $100 perfume (or cologne) instead of some actual content, I say to hell with it and start browsing the candy instead.
Just sayin.
And one more thing just occurred to me:
ReplyDeletePrint magazines will never die. Or else where would the aforementioned perfume/cologne ads go?
Hah.
Anna, you hit on an endless topic of conversation and argument between the editorial staffs and the ad-sales staffs at big glossy magazines (or at least at the one I work for). As editors, of course, we want readers to read our stories, so we want the contents page to be impossible to miss and we want the pages to be numbered clearly and etc, etc. What advertisers want to do is place their ads as close to the front of the magazine as possible (this is generally speaking, since sometimes there's a specific story within the magazine that they'll want to be adjacent to), because for all of time the assumption has been that readers pick up a magazine and begin at page 1 (which has an ad on it) and flip through to pages 2 and 3 and so on, stopping to look at and smell all those expensive ads before finally stumbling on the table of contents. They WANT the contents page to be hidden, because it means that readers will stumble over their ads in search of that page. And the people at magazines who sell ads want the same thing, because as long as this is the model, they can charge significantly more money for a page at the front of the magazine than for a page somewhere in the middle. And every argument an editor makes about trying to make the table of contents easier to find is met with heart attacks on the ad side, because that would defeat the whole sales strategy.
ReplyDeleteIf you ask me, I don't know a single person who actually enjoys looking at ads. We all want to get past them as quickly as possible. I never see the ones at the beginning, since I just keep flipping forward by several pages until I find the table of contents. The ads I see the most are the ones in the middle, say the three or four pages between two articles that interest me. I think people would see ads more if they were evenly spaced out--that way you don't get impatient flipping through them on the way to the content, like you do with 36 pages. But I assume the ad companies have the numbers to prove ads at the front sell more product or something.
ReplyDelete