Evening all
I'm just following up on a coupe of threads from this week.
LATE DELIVERY OF SUBSCRIBER ISSUES
I'm sorry to hear that some of you have yet to receive your subscriber copies of the February issue. FWIW I only got mine on Tuesday of this week.If there were no weather issues I, and every other subscriber, should have had it between Christmas and New Year.
Contrary to what one person might have been told by the subscriptions department all our 25,000 subs copies were couriered from our printers in Yorkshire into the IPC mailing house in Birmingham on December 20th and were into the Royal Mail system the next day.
The delays on this issue are entirely down to Royal Mail and the understandable impact of the bad weather we all experienced before Christmas. This situation was then compounded by backlog the normal extra demand on them at Christmas.
I'm afraid that once the magazines leave our mailing house we, and of course you, are completely in the hands of the Royal Mail.
As I advised in an earlier post if you haven’t had the issue please phone the subscriber hotline and let them know - you will, as many others posting here have, get your subscription extended by an issue by way of compensation.
For those who haven’t taken matters into their own hands and gone a bought a copy at the newsstand I have managed to source a box (20) of issues and will happily send one out FOC. This will be on a first come first served basis please email me michael_harris@ipcmedia.com with your name and address and I'll get a copy in the post to you.
ISSUE SIZE
I noticed a couple of posters say they hadn't bought the issue because it felt a bit 'thin'. The reason it was 'thin' was because at this time of year the advertising drops off as brands aren’t launching new product.
For nayone who is interested here is a bit of backgropund that explains how the ratios or editorial and advertsing pages works. Some of this I have covered before, other stuff I haven't
Every issue of Golf Monthly has between 102 ediorial pages (the February issue in question) and 114 ediotial pages (normally July) in it - with the average around the 107 mark.
Advertising and promotional pages vary between a low of 30 (the February issue in question) and a high of 70 (June issue).
This means issue ssizes vary between a low of 132 and a high of 180 during the year.
These are only guide figures and if we get more advertising than these quotas then we automaticlaly produce more editorial pages to keep the ratio of editorial to advertisng pages never less than 60/40 in favour of editorial.
However, if we dont sell all the advertisng alloaction then we come down in total issue but still keep all the ediotrial pages meaning there's an even higher percentage of editorial to ads.
In other words for those who don’t like to see advertising this was the issue of the year to buy as 78 percent of it was editorial!
Out of interest GM, Today’s Golfer and Golf World were all 132 pages for this issue and from a rough count all had the same split of editorial to advertising/promo pages.
One reason ours might have felt particularly skinny this month was because it was polybagged with the free tees and none of the other mags had a promotion. The polybags are made to be able to accomodate anything up to the size of our biggest packages (like May issue which contained a 180 page magazine and the free 60 page equipment guide) so when it’s only a 132 page issue plus a bag of tees it will feel quite loose.
Hope that's all of interest/use/whatever
Have a good weekend, hope those who are planning to get some golfing in get on the tee!
I'm just following up on a coupe of threads from this week.
LATE DELIVERY OF SUBSCRIBER ISSUES
I'm sorry to hear that some of you have yet to receive your subscriber copies of the February issue. FWIW I only got mine on Tuesday of this week.If there were no weather issues I, and every other subscriber, should have had it between Christmas and New Year.
Contrary to what one person might have been told by the subscriptions department all our 25,000 subs copies were couriered from our printers in Yorkshire into the IPC mailing house in Birmingham on December 20th and were into the Royal Mail system the next day.
The delays on this issue are entirely down to Royal Mail and the understandable impact of the bad weather we all experienced before Christmas. This situation was then compounded by backlog the normal extra demand on them at Christmas.
I'm afraid that once the magazines leave our mailing house we, and of course you, are completely in the hands of the Royal Mail.
As I advised in an earlier post if you haven’t had the issue please phone the subscriber hotline and let them know - you will, as many others posting here have, get your subscription extended by an issue by way of compensation.
For those who haven’t taken matters into their own hands and gone a bought a copy at the newsstand I have managed to source a box (20) of issues and will happily send one out FOC. This will be on a first come first served basis please email me michael_harris@ipcmedia.com with your name and address and I'll get a copy in the post to you.
ISSUE SIZE
I noticed a couple of posters say they hadn't bought the issue because it felt a bit 'thin'. The reason it was 'thin' was because at this time of year the advertising drops off as brands aren’t launching new product.
For nayone who is interested here is a bit of backgropund that explains how the ratios or editorial and advertsing pages works. Some of this I have covered before, other stuff I haven't
Every issue of Golf Monthly has between 102 ediorial pages (the February issue in question) and 114 ediotial pages (normally July) in it - with the average around the 107 mark.
Advertising and promotional pages vary between a low of 30 (the February issue in question) and a high of 70 (June issue).
This means issue ssizes vary between a low of 132 and a high of 180 during the year.
These are only guide figures and if we get more advertising than these quotas then we automaticlaly produce more editorial pages to keep the ratio of editorial to advertisng pages never less than 60/40 in favour of editorial.
However, if we dont sell all the advertisng alloaction then we come down in total issue but still keep all the ediotrial pages meaning there's an even higher percentage of editorial to ads.
In other words for those who don’t like to see advertising this was the issue of the year to buy as 78 percent of it was editorial!
Out of interest GM, Today’s Golfer and Golf World were all 132 pages for this issue and from a rough count all had the same split of editorial to advertising/promo pages.
One reason ours might have felt particularly skinny this month was because it was polybagged with the free tees and none of the other mags had a promotion. The polybags are made to be able to accomodate anything up to the size of our biggest packages (like May issue which contained a 180 page magazine and the free 60 page equipment guide) so when it’s only a 132 page issue plus a bag of tees it will feel quite loose.
Hope that's all of interest/use/whatever
Have a good weekend, hope those who are planning to get some golfing in get on the tee!
