Well, gang, one of my current classes is Statistics. We have to do a project, and out of my ideas, my instructor like dmy idea of a study of MR ads the best, so I went with it. It was political decision.
My idea initially was to do a year-by-year breakout for every year in my collection (1959 to current, missing some years). After taking two hours to do the first mag (June, 1961), I decided to go with one every 10 years.
I have now completed 1961, 1970 (I have no 1971s), and 1981, and the suspicion is correct. MR is becoming more and more chock-full of advertising. Not only are there more ads, but they’re getting bigger, although some of this maybe due to outliers, such as multi-full-page ads for some mail order outfits.
At any rate, I summed up the column-inches of advertising for these 3 magazines and divided by the total column-inches in each magazine and got the following percentages:
I’ll be trying to crunch the numbers for 1991 and 2001 in the coming days and then write my paper, which I’ll then put up on the web once I turn it in for a grade, probably around the end of August. I can put up the URL for it once I get it done, if you’re all interested. It’ll be dry reading, but it’ll have some graphs that will tell the story.
Waaaaay too easy as it stands. What was the mean shift between 1995 and the present, by year? Does the rate of expansion of GNP have an impact? What is the range within a year? Is it out of control?
do you take account for the fact that in 61 there weren’t anywhere the number of hobby manufacturers that has grown since then,and now internet and 800 stores…
You also need to compare column inches of articles per year and inches of text vs. inches of photos. Are the actual amount of non-advertising going up or down? If a 1950 issue had 200 column inches of articles and a current issue has 200 column inches of articles, then the increase in advertising is a wash. If the number of pages remains constant and advertising increases from 25% to 50% then we are losing “value” of the magazine. similarly if there where 200 inches of articles in 1950 and 105 was pictures vs 200 in of articles in 1995 and 25% was pictures then we are getting less information now than then.
I remember taking statistics in college, what a headache! Not quite pure math, not quite science, not quite definable. I remember walking out after the final thinking Thank God I am done with this!!! One other thing that you might want to factor in is the cost of the magazine (has it risen in relationship to inflation rate) I would also figure the cost of today’s mag in 1971 dollars and compare the inch columns to come out with a “cost per column” in static dollars.
my two cents
Randy Johnson
I suspect that the size of the ads will ‘shrink’ after about 2000. Many of the large multi-page advertisers now have gone to a smaller ‘splash’ ad with a note to check their ‘internet’ site. This has become more common in all advertising. Back in the 90’s, ‘Computer Shopper’ could have 800+ pages(mainly large multi-page ads). Now the publication is a mere shell of itself. The last time I looked at one(about 2 years ago), it was quite ‘thin’. Note that the large M B Klein ads are down to listing their URL.
In the 70’s we started seeing large discount advertising in the model publications, and this has grown over the years. The size(number of pages has grown as well) to hold all of this advertising. This has generated more revenue for the magazines, and the number of copies/issue has gone up each year. Now we are seeing a drop in the large advertising, and a falling publication rate.
Some magazines make most of their revenue by the advertising. I suspect MR & RMC have had to walk the line between advertising and subscriptions to make the business.
Jay, I for one would be interested in seeing the final outcome of your study as I have pursued this same area as well. And like dehusman, I’d also be very interested to see exactly how column inches of text vs. illustrations has change over the years (I already know that the text has decreased dramatically).
As a very brief overview, I can offer the following interesting points. The January 2005 MR was more than 80 full pages thinner than the 1995 issue (1/3 less magazine for the money, with proportionally less text). Likewise, I posted here somewhere recently that either the June or July 2005 issue had the greatest ads to text ratio ever (roughly something close to 60:40)! Likewise, MR is selling about 45,000 magazines less per month now than it did a decade ago.
All good criticisms from what I see so far. My study was more the type and amount of advertising over the years, but I have the time, I can maybe also squeeze in a text/pictures/ad ratio.
I expect that the criticism that the current ads will be smaller is probably correct. 1981 saw the inception (in my study) of large multi-page ads, a few spanning 4 pages. I would expect that jrbernier is correct in thinking that those will go away in the future (from a 1981 standpoint).
Inflation rate is a tricky thing to deal with, and as this is elementary stats, I don’t think I can accurately get into that. To a get a true idea of the inflation rate, I’d have to deal with inflation in paper, printing processes, labor costs, hardware, etc, rather than just deal with the mean CPI, which for electronics has risen much more slowly than many other items (case in point, I can remember 25-inch TVs being $700 in 1973. What are they now?)
Keep the criticisms and comments coming. I’ll be watching.
very interesting . i was thinking of doing a comparison of adds to articles a while ago when someone here posted about the end of the coming events column in MR and someone else said they thought there were more ads too . never got around to it since i had no real motivation to , but i guess you do so we’ll all see the results . thanks for sharing your info !
It may be fun to track some of the advertisers over the years. You could simply go with the big names, Atlas, Bachmann, MRC etc. Which co’s are still around?
The prime positions are inside the front cover, or on & inside the back cover.
Another important thing to notice is the use of 4color ads & how they become incorporated into the magazine. It costs more & the magazine will charge more for the use of color. You could compare this with the cover price of the magazine.
One way to consider inflation is to note the cover & subscription prices of the magazine. I doubt if the magazine would list any prices for little ads in the back , similar to the ones you see in the daily newspaper. It may be even more difficult to make up a basket of model railroad materials, such as a bottle of paint, tubes of glue, a piece of flextrak, a standard sectional track, etc & use that as an indicator of prices.
Make a note of the NUMBER of advertisers over the years. Rember, it is also a service to the modeler to let him/her KNOW of a manufacturer or supplier. I shall be watching this.
There are lies
There are da***d lies
and there are STATISTICS.
-Mark Twain
[}:)]
I’d be interested, jay_c, in your final paper as well. If you could post a link when you get it done, I would like to read your findings. Any one who has followed MR over the years “knows” that the text articles have diminished not only in size, but also in the quantity of content. The quality is still there, it seems more concise with fewer explanations / photos. Just my two cents…but I’d still like to read your final paper.
Wdlgln005: I initially started recording the names of the advertisers, but this was a large part of the 2 hours required to finish a 72-page magazine. I dropped that and was able to get 1970 and 1981 mags in 2 hours.
The number of ads will is recorded on the spreadsheets. For purposes of the project, I’m tracking mean, median, quartiles, mean absolute deviation, standard deviation, variance, and Pearson’s Index of Skewness.
So far, the Pearson’s Index for the all 3 mags are skewed right in area of ads (indicating most ads are small), but 1970 and 1981 indicate almost a normal distribution, although the mean and median are still 15 square inches apart (1981: 27.63 and 12.50 respectively).
One problem with your data. IF and I say IF the number of pages was constant there could be a problem. IF and I say IF the number of pages of articles is the same or increased it could be good.
It sounds like a very interesting study, and I will be interested in the results. I don’t really know whether you will be able to determine whether MR has gotten “better” or “worse”.
If we started seeing full page ads for Budweiser or Viagra, that would be offensive and a waste of space. But since virtually all the advertising is related to Model Railroading, I find that the ads are sometimes as informative as the articles.
Interesting stuff. We hear a lot of hearsay, and naysayers say “Nay” a lot, on all forums of this type. Here is someone giving us hard data, and getting credit for it in the real world to boot! Good work , Jay!
And now, my plug. Suppose you did this to Time or Newsweek? These are mags with very different target audiences, and very different advertising. Most of the ads in those mags are “image” or “name recognition,” while a lot of the Model Railroader ads are infomercials. Do you read the details of the ads for phloxloxipham, a made-up pharmeceutical for people who sneeze while eating cold salmon when the pollen count is high? Of course not. Do you check out the details of the Trainworld ad? You bet you do! The advertising in MR is VERY targetted, and thus far less offensive and far more acceptable than the pages of plugs in general-audience mags.
All of you guys are making me feel bad, since I teach Business Sadistics (oops! I meant Statistics) in college. By the way, my students don’t like the course any better than any of you do/did, but they do give me high marks on the student evaluations, so maybe the course can be tolerable if not fun.
As to the amount of advertising, I would might use a time-series technique and include a couple of extra explanatory variables in the model like number of known manufacturers that year.
My gripe with MR is not the number of ads, since every magazine seems to have increase the amount of advertising, but my real gripe is that MR seems to be much more geared towards the newbie/beginner than it was in the 1960’s under the editorship of the late Linn Westcott. The difference stood out to me since I have been out of the hobby for about 30 years and just got back in a year or two ago.
Now, does anybody have a cure for the problems of coming up with a decent track plan that uses curves that my LL P2000 E8 and my Spectrum 4-8-2’s will tolerate (18" radius is a no-no) and the “I hate carpentry work” syndrome? By the way, on my salary, hiring the work is not an option.
It may be interesting to see how advertising has permeated MR over the years, but I think it’s important to note that MR’s advertising revenue helps hold down the cost of the magazine at the newstand and at the subscription level. Furthermore, while articles for “veterans” are welcome, it seems to me that we would all like to see the hobby continue to grow during our lifetimes, and even continue on afterwards so that we can leave a legacy rather than just a memento.
Hey, W…Fats! I didn’t find statistics that boring in college, but I was a math and science person. Anyway, you can accommodate your large steamers using flex track, which can be bent to any curve radius you like. If you need help, there are a number of model railroad planning programs available (CadRail, 3rdPlanIt, etc.) that are really good at figuring out how big a curve can be fit into how small (or large) a space. And, Atlas has a free design program that you can download from their website. Check the Layout Planning Forum for more info, or do a search through this forum.
You have a probability of 1.0 of enjoying the hobby again after your hiatus, and you will find close to 100% of all respondents to these forums willing to help you out with any questions.
Advertising in itself isn’t bad. It could mean there are more manufacturers out there (until MTH sues them out of business or Walthers buys them). However if the content is declining or the quality of it is declining then there is a problem. I don’t think your sample is large enough in this audience to have a representative sample without a large degree of error. You ceratinly aren’t going to get anywhwere near a six sigma representation. I expect your margin of error could be in the 20% or higher range. My MBA in Marketing (U. of Chicago) indicates marketing questions are very difficult to accurately access without being asked several ways to diverse groups.