Cycling Plus

[landsurfer]

I have come in for some grief from my 12 year old grandson recently.
While leafing through one of my cycling magazines he looked up and said, " Do you really pay for this grandad, it's just a catalogue ..."

So we decided to do a survey, the results as follows;

Magazine .. Cycling Plus, Issue 321 December 2016.
Total number of pages .. 156.
Total number of pages of non promotional copy .. 39.
Yes, 39 pages out of 156 not positively promoting a product.
8 of the 39 pages where full page photos.
But nice photos.

He wins ......

[Barred1]

Different subject matter . . . but don't let the boy near The Sunday Times - it's got progressively smaller in page volume and even harder to find any editorial text.

B1

[rotavator]

The reason for this is that magazines get more income from advertisers than from their readers. This is also the reason that you very rarely see scathing reviews of products, with ratings less than 7/10 say, in specialist magazines.

I used to subscribe to Cycling Plus magazine but gave up partly because of the lack of independent reviews.

[Bmblbzzz]

It's come a long, long way from its origins in the early '90s.

[Sweep]

Yes it used to be very good.

I bought it for many years and even have years of bound copies.

I cancelled my subs about 10 years ago.

It used to be a broadly based cycling mag.

Last time I looked it appeared to be focussed on wannabee TdF weekend racers looking to impress folks with their expensive kit.

[Richard Fairhurst]

On every magazine I've worked full-time on (edited two, deputy editor for two others), more advertising means more editorial.

Put simply, you only expand a magazine in "sections" of 8 or (better) 16 pages. So the publisher comes to you a week before press date and says "the ad department have sold four more pages of advertising, we're going to add an extra section. Can you fill the other four pages?". You curse a bit but you do it and, lo and behold, the magazine has more editorial.

But I haven't written for a Future magazine since the late 90s and have never written for Immediate (Future published C+ until 2014, when Immediate bought it), so things may be different there. I do remember they had an inordinate fondness for "house ads" at the time I wrote for them (advertising for the publishers' other magazines and products - always the quickest way to fill pages).

[De Sisti]

it appeared to be focused on wannabee TdF weekend racers looking to impress folks with their expensive kit.

I agree. The front page always used to have a skinny wannabe racer on the drops, out of the saddle and appearing to be sprinting.
I did make a comment to the editors; and their reply was that image was the type of rider they were trying to appeal to. Like Sweep,
I stopped buying the magazine around the same time.

[cycleruk]

I gave up buying magazines years ago when I realised that 3 magazines = a chain.