When I pick up most magazines, I don’t even see the ads. Most of them are for products I have no use for, anyway, like fingernail polish, denture adhesive or diet beer. In model train magazines, though, the ads are generally pretty interesting. These are products I care about, even if it’s just to say “Oooh” at them because the era is wrong for my layout, or the price is wrong for my credit card. Kalmbach and other model railroad magazine publishers should get premium ad rates, because their advertisers get a very well-selected audience, specifically targeted for their products. Does it work this way? I dunno.
If MR didn’t have any ads, I would get through it a lot quicker. I may be in the minority on this one, but I really get a lot out of MR’s advertising pages.
As a side note, our public library subscribes to Model Railroader. Check your library out if you’re in the habit of “previewing” MR before you buy a copy.
I had’nt noticed the lack of content.Almost every issue has something that I find useful in my modeling.I also look foward to the ads as it keeps me updated on whats new or available.Each issue usually sparks 1 or 2 sales from me.I find the photos a great help in my modeling…no matter which scale they are in.Be patient,maybe every issue can’t be a gem,but I"m sure that some of us got something out of it.
I’d like to clarify a few of the topics that have come up here.
First, while we need to adjust the amount of editorial content (i.e. stories, reviews, photos, etc.) slightly from month to month because there are only some magazine sizes that are possible, the amount of editorial content doesn’t change much from issue to issue. The ad volume (which is less than half the magazine) does, and that’s the fundamental reason why you’ll see the page counts change through the year.
Second, we have not taken stories out of MR to put them in the special issues. The content that goes into the specials is created especially for those issues.
Thanks for reading MR,
Terry
Before I lock this, I would like to encourage everyone to find my old post that responds to the notion that there’s more advertising in MR than ever before. Since I used to be the ad sales manager for MR, I can speak as an authority when I say it’s simply not true.