What is a Magazine?

Magazine >>>

Everyone has a stack of old magazines lying around the house somewhere, and whether you're walking past a newsstand in the mall or sitting in the dentist's office, you're going to be tempted to pick up a magazine and flip straight through the pages. Magazines are everywhere, but what are they exactly?

On one hand, magazines are a mechanism for providing population with current information on a broad range of topics on a regular basis - normally monthly, but in some cases even weekly.

Magazine

However, the word magazine was originally used to indicate a storage for grain or gunpowder, so how did the term come to be related with a periodical publication?

The first periodical to use the word magazine in its title was started in London by Edward Cave in 1731. Cave used the word magazine in the name of his 'Gentleman's Magazine' to advise that this new publication was a storage of information, providing all the news that a civilized someone needed in order to keep up to date on what was going on in the world. Cave's magazine was tremendously successful, and within a few years any spin-off publications began to appear in London and in the United States.

Magazines have gone straight through a involved evolution over the years, and it is instructive to think of magazines as belonging to one of three confident categories: trade, news, and consumer.

Trade magazines are designed to inform the members of a singular professional or occupational group, of items of exact interest to them. Individuals and businesses buy subscriptions to trade magazines, and most of the article is written by and for population in the trade - for example, accountants or school teachers. These magazines are ordinarily not available to the normal public, and any advertising that they may include (usually not much) tends to be directed at members of that trade.

News magazines, which in the case of publications like 'Time' or 'The Economist' are often published weekly, are directed at a broad readership. These magazines are designed to supply a singular source straight through which readers can catch up on news, current events, and hot topics. They are available in bookstores, at newsstands, as well as by subscription, and the moderate whole of advertising that they include is quite varied with respect to products displayed, and quite normal in terms of the coming taken in the ads.

The vast majority of contemporary magazines fall into the buyer category, and these magazines are directed at highly exact segments of the population, whether dog-lovers, gardeners, brides-to-be, or population who want to get rich. buyer magazines normally include a whole of small articles that deal with topics of interest to the targeted group, but in most instances the bulk of available space is devoted to advertising.

In buyer magazines, advertisers have the occasion to pitch well-defined mixes of products, in a way that speaks directly to the targeted group. For the marketer, this means that they are getting maximum penetration with their message, and for publishers this means that they can rely on the advertisers to create the bulk of their revenue stream. With buyer magazines, actual sales of the magazine are a secondary consideration. What matters is that inherent advertisers think that, straight through magazines, information about their products is getting directly into the hands of those population who are most likely to buy what they are selling.

Every time you pick up a magazine that catches your interest, even if only to browse straight through it briefly, you are one step closer to buying something, and if magazines are doing what they are designed to do that something is not going to be the magazine.

What is a Magazine?