The Glossies: The Land of Make-believe
By Simon Dumenco, FOLIO

It’s no secret that everybody in the magazine industry is highly skeptical about circulation numbers—even their own. So if absolutely nobody trusts the numbers, what do they really mean?

I was talking to a big-deal magazine editor-in-chief the other day about a certain women’s magazine. We were making fun of its idiotic cover, and I said, "But I suppose they know what they’re doing, because their circulation is up, right?"

"Well, who knows?" she replied. "I hear their circ is all bulk." The mag, she explained, was widely rumored to rely heavily on the discounted bulk-rate subscriptions of beauty salons and such.

Another editor scoffs when I mention a competitor’s numbers. The monthly in question, which has zoomed over the 500,000 mark (the magic number above which a publication must rise if it has any hope of attracting national advertisers), was, he says, padding its circ with subscribers gained through cold-call telemarketing sales (which yield indifferent subscribers, who have near-zero renewal rates) and other dubious strategies. "There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that the ratebase they’re claiming is real," he says.

Yet another editor friend says that at one national publication he worked at, the general executive-level understanding was that only about a third of the magazine’s ratebase was truly legit (i.e., actual people who really wanted the magazine). Much of the rest of the lofty ratebase was comprised of "readers" gained through a shady circ-pumping operation that charged a bounty of a few bucks per head. Read more