• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, March 9, 2010

Bona fide advertising revenue figures for magazines are notoriously hard to come by, as it is common practice for publishers to give advertisers discounts off official rate cards, meaning that real revenues are often much lower than those reported by the Publishers Information Bureau. 

However, you can get some idea of the average discount rate, and with it the general health of the industry, by comparing overall PIB figures with independent revenue estimates.

The official rate card figures compiled by PIB for 2009 put total consumer magazine ad revenues (including newspaper-distributed monthly and weekly magazines) at $21.1 billion, down 17.5% from $25.6 billion in 2008.

This figure is already a bit suspect, however -- considering that total ad pages fell 25.6% over the same time period, from 233,558 to 173,375. While it's not impossible, it seems unlikely that during one of the worst economic downturns in decades, magazine publishers actually raised the average price per page 11% from $109,801 in 2008 to $121,712 in 2009.

Independent analysts seem to agree that the medium's advertising revenues were quite a bit lower than the PIB figures. A recent overview from Outsell has total magazine ad revenues at about $9.2 billion in 2009, while Magna's Brian Wieser pegged them at about $15.4 billion in his January overview of 2009 and forecast for 2010.

Comparing these numbers with PIB estimates, it would appear the magazine industry as a whole is giving advertisers discounts ranging from 27% to 57% off the official rate cards.

It should be remembered that these figures are general, however, as some magazine publishers (like Conde Nast) have a reputation for offering few if any ad page discounts. By contrast, other publishers have reportedly offered discounts of over 70%.