Leading Resource for Magazine Publishing Professionals
Media Vent
By Bob Sacks
About Bob
Bob Sacks (aka BoSacks) is a printing/publishing industry consultant and president of The Precision Media Group (BoSacks.com). He is also the co-founder of the research company Media-Ideas (Media-Ideas.net), and publisher and editor of a daily international e-newsletter, Heard on the Web. Sacks has held posts as director of manufacturing and distribution, senior sales manager (paper), chief of operations, pressman, circulator and almost every other job this industry has to offer.
Pub Talk
What Exactly is 'Publisher's Own Data?'
Jan 22, 2010Anyone who uses products like Alexa, Compete.com or Quantcast for anything but a friendly way to compare one Web site...
Why I Don't Trust PIB's Ad Revenue Reports
Media Daily News reported today what most of us have been aware of, well, forever. The Publishers Information Bureau (PIB) isn't worth the paper it is printed on. At least, not the revenue-reporting part of the report. I have never trusted the revenue "rate card" side of the reporting and rather focused my attention on the reported page count. At least that is based on science and not numeric, wishful alchemy.
It's sort of like a trip to the doctor. You can visually see if your family is growing, but science with blood tests will confirm or deny the truth of the apparently, but not necessarily, obvious health.
Media Daily reports, "So a periodic reality check can put the PIB revenue figures in perspective. Just how big are discounts on magazine rate cards nowadays? The short answer is: A lot. The long answer is: anywhere from 40 percent to 75 percent, depending on the publisher."
Wow, that is a lot of smoke and mirrors. A great deal of Media Daily's report is conjecture deduced from publicly traded companies who release actual revenue figures that permit comparisons as part of SEC filings and earnings announcements. So even if they are wrong by 50 percent (is that possible?) the range of deception is 20 percent to 35 percent.
Either way you look at it and either set of figures you want to believe, the PIB revenue is at best unreliable and at worst, and let's be polite, a sad deception of the uninformed.
It's sort of like a trip to the doctor. You can visually see if your family is growing, but science with blood tests will confirm or deny the truth of the apparently, but not necessarily, obvious health.
Media Daily reports, "So a periodic reality check can put the PIB revenue figures in perspective. Just how big are discounts on magazine rate cards nowadays? The short answer is: A lot. The long answer is: anywhere from 40 percent to 75 percent, depending on the publisher."
Wow, that is a lot of smoke and mirrors. A great deal of Media Daily's report is conjecture deduced from publicly traded companies who release actual revenue figures that permit comparisons as part of SEC filings and earnings announcements. So even if they are wrong by 50 percent (is that possible?) the range of deception is 20 percent to 35 percent.
Either way you look at it and either set of figures you want to believe, the PIB revenue is at best unreliable and at worst, and let's be polite, a sad deception of the uninformed.
