How to set up your own magazine course

Lesson 4 – Ways of making money

LESSON OBJECTIVES

Understand what circulation is.
Understand the different ways a magazine can make money.

Where to start?

When I helped set up the magazine I am now editor of, the person who founded it had a long list of established contacts that we could get advertising from. As mentioned before, the first edition of the magazine reached 20,000 inboxes!

It is really hard to persuade advertisers to take a chance on a new publication, and just to make money, you might want to offer them other services. For example, the publication I am editor of comes under the umbrella of a company that also offers social media marketing to our clients, which is another way to hook them in.

Plus, it is really worth offering advertisers a below-market price for an advert because they do not know what to expect from a new publication. It is only once you have impressed them with a snazzy ad and achieved some impressive readership numbers following the release of the first edition of your magazine that you can really start to bring more people on board.

Be prepared to do some literal legwork, too. The area my publication covers is massive, and requires a lot of driving to go and meet pre-existing clients and find new ones. And as a new publication cannot afford loads of staff, with some of them prepared to work for free, you have to be all things at once – an editor, a reporter, and a salesman! It is not easy, but trust me, it is worth it.

It is important to remember that circulation and readership are not the same thing – you do not have to buy a magazine to contribute towards its circulation.

The Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) is designed to calculate accurate figures for publishers, who pay to have their numbers inspected and published in reports once or twice a year. This helps publications establish credibility with advertisers, and it helps them know how many people are purchasing a magazine and seeing their advertising.

The top figure on an ABC certificate is Total Average Net Circulation Per Issue. This is then broken down into different groups:

1. Newstrade – this figure shows how many people have bought a magazine from a newsagent or supermarket.

2. Basic Cover Price – if advertisers can see a magazine has many committed readers, it makes them more confident that people will continually buy a magazine and see their ads.

3. Single Copy Subscription Sales – this helps advertisers see how many people pay to have a magazine subscription.

4. Multiple Copy Subscription Sales – this applies mostly to B2B magazines as the managers of a business may wish to be kept up to date with news in that section.

5. Regular Bulk Sales – where weekly or monthly copies of a magazine are delivered as one single lot to an address.

6. Issue Specific Bulk Sales – where an individual or company may buy a load of single issue because they feature in it.

7. Society/Association/Organisation Circulation – applies to magazines published for members of an organisation.

8. Controlled Free Circulation, Non-Controlled Free Circulation, and Monitored Free Distribution – categories where the magazine is given away for free.

Once you have set up your publication, it is best to get ABC-registered ASAP.

How to make money

Should I use newsstands? This is a very costly model as the magazine has to be printed to the highest quality and major retailers charge a bomb to have a magazine prominently displayed. Adding DVDs, for example, is another cost to production.

However, according to What’s New In Publishing, Bauer Media launched its third new newsstand title for 2018 in September. TV Years: The Eighties appeared on newsstands less than a month after the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) declared its consumer magazines report for the first six months of 2018. It confirmed Bauer as the UK’s biggest selling magazine publisher with 70.4 million copies circulated.

Rob Munro-Hall, group managing director at Bauer Magazine Media told What’s New In Publishing “the prevailing wisdom now” is that print titles have to offer an experience that cannot be replicated on another medium. So many publications can still make from the newsstand model if they focus on quality.

But for the type of publication I edit, it is just not worth going down the newsstand model, especially as we haven’t even got a print edition yet.

Does giving your magazine away for free work? As someone who is editor of a free publication, I’d say ‘of course it does.’

However, advertisers will question the strength of loyalty towards a brand that distributes free magazines and there is often a low quality of distribution. Publications that are distributed away for free either through people’s doors or on the steps have to be paid for by advertisers, so you must make sure you get a sufficient number of advertisers to go down this route.

I am producing a B2B magazine and whilst I want business people to read my magazine for free, I want to charge those outside of the business community. Is that a good idea?

The answer is yes. By focusing on a specific target audience, this prevents publishers from distributing and printing a magazine to a large number of people who do not want it. The magazine will also contain very specific adverts.

I only have a digital publication, so I depend upon social media to distribute my magazine…

For digital publications, social media really is the best way to distribute digital magazines, particularly Facebook.

The advantage of setting up a Facebook page is that, for example, if you are setting up a local publication, you can invite friends you know in the region you cover or businesses in the area you are reporting on to invite your page, and then they can encourage others to do the same, and you get hits through word of mouth.

Plus, you can share your magazine on Facebook groups, but be careful – Facebook can be funny about pages posting on groups regularly.

A good way to generate hits on Facebook is by paying for ads, but be prepared to invest some capital to produce regular ads.

That is why it is a good idea to establish credibility with your advertisers when it comes to a digital magazine, produce a distribution list of email addresses, and then more and more people will become aware of your digital publication. Endorsements from advertisers on social media really boosts the credibility of a publication.

Always make sure you use social media to promote content that will attract hundreds, and hopefully thousands, of hits.

Media packs

These explain who is reading the magazine, their social class, their sex, age, income, etc. They also give details of the cost of advertising in a magazine (called the ratecard), although those prices are up for negotiation, as well as outlining deadlines and contact details.

Publishers can charge more for adverts if their magazines have a higher circulation and readership.

Cost Per Thousand

The Cost Per Thousand or Cost Per Mile means the cost to the advertiser for their advert being seen by 1,000 people. This can be calculated for readership or circulation.

The formula for calculating the CPM by circulation for a single page is:

The cost of a page of advertisement x 1,000

Other ways to make money

Advertising features: Usually found in newspapers or magazines, a client buys space in one of these types of publications to place an advertising feature that looks like an article written by a journalist.

Sponsored editorials: A sponsor or third party can sponsor features whose brand will be displayed alongside copy written by a journalist, though the sponsor suggests what type of content goes into the article.

Directories: Used by B2B publications to make more money, directories, often published annually, include contact details for a host of businesses connected with a sector.

Exhibitions: Publishers often organise exhibitions relating to their field and this too raises money. This information is available on the ABC website.

Awards ceremonies: By entering the awards and buying seats at a publication’s awards ceremony, this generates even more revenue.

Distribution: Magazines are distributed to wholesalers who that have exclusivity in the areas they control. In other words, the UK is divided up into a large number of geographical areas and in most of these districts, only one wholesaler has the right to distribute magazines. Wholesalers then compete to gain control of more distribution districts after a while.

Assignment

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