Is it just me or did the Model Railroader this month lose about 40 pages! I understand losing some advertisement, but dang. Got to love paying full price though!!
I’ve noticed a very significant drop in advertising, possibly due to the current condition of the economy coupled with the summer doldrums when people are busy outside instead of modeling.
Okay, from an old guy. All magazines are losing advertising, not just MR. It is because of “gasp”, the internet. Hobby shops who carried full page and even multi page advertising now have websites. I suspect a lot of the hobby shops have disappeared for the same reason. “We” would rather sit at our computer and order things (at discounts) than put on our shoes, drive to a hobbyshop and see it in person. Then we complain when what comes in the mail doesn’t meet our expectations.
I come from an old generation who enjoyed driving to the hobby shop, still do, but gas is more expensive, so I wait until I need gas, then drive from Kansas City Kansas to the hobby shop in Kansas City MO where the gas is cheaper to fill up.
Face it, times have changed, not necessarily for the better, but they have changed. PS I still take MR by mail.
Bob
Isn’t this a normal thing for the summer months? And then advertising picks back up when Fall gets here.
Hi Jeff,
Yeah I noticed that too. Even Trainworld(land) had only two pages instead of their usual four. By the way…did you ever knock out that wall yet for the new staging yard? Give me a call when you get a chance. Betty has surgery this week and i’ll have to stay home a few days to take care of her…Chuck
Not exactly. While the December and January issues of MR are historically indeed always the largest by page-count in the course of a year, MR’s average page-count has been declining steadily for better than a dozen years now. Current issues have about half the number of pages they did back in the mid 1990’s (and just as much editorial text has been dropped as advertisement).
Recent issues have been hovering around 100 pages, a figure MR readers haven’t seen since the mid 1970’s. Incidentally, RMC now actually exceeds MR slightly in total monthly page-count for the first time ever and probably by a significant margin in editorial content.
CNJ831
I honestly think it’s a combination of economy, Internet and what I call the summer slow down. I think summer has had an effect on the traffic right here on the forums for that matter. Seems like everybody is busy elsewhere at the moment. [:)] [2c]
This doesn’t explain how or why RMC is beating MR in terms of pages of actual content.
Maybe people who are strapped for disposable cash and have time on their hands due to curtailed work hours have rediscovered (or found, for the first time) the joys of scratchbuilding or kitbashing. RMC is a lot stronger in those areas than MR usually is.
I really think that Kalmbach could make a buck by compiling all those old Dollar Model articles into a single book. Scratchbuilding may be a minority art, but hard times could breathe a lot of new life into it.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
I subscribe to MR and RMC, but being a western fan and modeler doing the 1989 period, I don’t find a lot of interes in RMC. In fact, I will let my sub run out.
Bob