MR Page Count

[Teditor]

OK John, I'm going to stick my kneck out with the results of a casual observation within the last half hour or so.

The medium we are using so freely at the moment could be part of the cause of the advertising decline in the printed media.

I have just received an N scale Life-Like Mallett from a local Brisbane Qld dealer, up to now, nothing has appeared in print regarding these engines that I have come across, yet I tagged onto N Scale Supplies web site and there was a full rundown of the locomotive, its quirks and its benefits.

The printed media unfortunately has a time lag in getting the advertising message across and as a lot of the retailers such as N Scale Supply provide so much information 'immediately' why should the advertising dollars go to what would seem the less effective way of the printed media?

'Not' everyone has the internet on so I would imagine advertising must be split resourcefully by still maintaining a printed outlet to some degree, but there are a lot of dedicated model railroad magazines out there to spread the dollar amongst, and I would imagine they all market their own benefits as to why advertisiers should select them. I don't have any idea how advertising budgets and/or costs are tabulated, but I imagene it would be tough.

I still stand by the fact that 'my' opinion is that MR is still the bible of model railroading and although the ads and reviews appear well behind the net, I still prefer the hard printed copy that I can keep and treasure.

Hope I'm still on the right planet?

Teditor.

[Anonymous]

But as I pointed out, RMC has kept even. So I think it's worth asking how that happened -- if some advertisers went under or cut their budgets, RMC was a lot luckier than MR. It may have nothing to do with articles, etc., but clearly RMC has done something, or hasn't done something, that MR did, or didn't, do.

If Kalmbach has on-the-ball managers, they'd have their circulation, ad pages, etc., graphed in detail, and graphed against the competition's statistics and the economy. If they were publicly held, they'd have to account for their performance to Wall Street.

Since they aren't publicly held, they nevertheless ought to be able to make some sort of public explanation, as I would guess that advertisers ask themselves what the benefit of each dollar spent in each magazine is. To an outside observer, for every guy who asks if his MR subscription is worth the bucks, an advertiser is likely asking if his ad is worth the bucks, and we're seeing the result in decreased ad pages.

I certainly hope someone from MR can explain where I'm off base here.

[Anonymous]

John:

There probably is less advertising because of the state of the economy. Many of the discounters and internet retailers that took a lot of space in MR have reduced their advertising budgfets or have gone out of business. In terms of articles and other non-advertising content, MR seems to have maintained its high level of quality and in my humble opinion has actually improved over the past year.

Jim

[Anonymous]

Ted is saying he likes MR, and I can't disagree. But my question is why enough others have changed their minds that MR's page count is declining. As an outside observer, this suggests to me that advertisers aren't buying as many ads in MR as they did a year ago, and the year before that, etc. I may be wrong, which is why I'm wondering if someone from MR might be willing to comment.

Since my previous post, I double checked, and RMC for February 2002 had 122 pages; February 2003 also has 122 pages. If RMC were following the same pattern as MR, it would have only about 116 pages.

So this is an interesting question that's brought about by hard data. We all would prefer that the hobby's flagship publication be as healthy as possible, and in that I agree with Ted. But assuming the numbers aren't that good, I'd be interested to hear why!

[Teditor]

I have been a subsciber to MR for many years and I'm not about to stop. I also get Trains and all the annuals, but I also get RMC. In Australia, we have a locally produced magazine that is also a must have on my list (Australian Model Railway Magazine).
As editor of a club magazine that is produced monthly with 40 pages, colour and 160 copies a month, I can appreciate the amount of effort that goes into producing such magazines, my work is nothing compared to the big name mags.

No one forces anyone to buy anything, you either want it or you don't. I don't think Kalmbach 'in general' have gone down hill at all and know just how popular it is down here in Aus, and we pay around $12.00 an issue.

Teditor

[Anonymous]

I can't help noticing that a random survey of MR issues compared to the year-earlier issue seems to reflect a pretty consistent decline of 5% or so in total pages. For instance, the January 2002 issue had 170 pages; the January 2003 issue had 162. (The January 2000 issue had 210, something more like what we used to see for holiday period MRs.) October 2001 had 154 pages; October 2002 had 146. Like others who've expressed opinions here, I've let my own subscription expire, and I don't buy all issues of MR at the hobby shop, so I don't have a full set to compare.

Then I did a little quick arithmetic over page count in all magazines. Let's say that MR averages 150 pages per month lately; let's give RMC an average of 120 pages; and let's say each of the other three monthly US model railroading magazines averages 60 pages each. That's a total of about 450 pages of model railroad magazine a month. MR's share of pages per month is about a third.

In the days some of us remember when MR and RMC were the only two mags, MR's share of pages per month would have been well over half. Since the 1970s, several monthly magazines have come in to absorb some portion of this market, and interestingly, some of these magazines have survived for 20 years and more, with levels of production quality generally nowhere near as good as MR. Why hasn't MR been able to clean their clock? If MR's share of pages alone had remained consistent, you'd see monthly issues of MR in the 300 page range.

And ads aren't duplicated among the mags. You see high-end brass suppliers advertising in the smaller mags, not MR, apparently because the ad buy elsewhere is a better buy -- you reach more people willing to spend serious money on the hobby in the other mags, while MR sees a lot of low-end ads, schlock, and kitsch (and I notice a lot of the full-page ads in MR are cross-selling other Kalmbach products).

Is anyone at MR willing to comment on the future of the magazine? I can't imagine that Kalmbach can be happy with a steady 5% page count decline from one year to the next, with what this must also say about circulation and ad revenue.