2) "Lower ad pages." I get a sense, from reading this thread, that some of you look at ad pages as an intrusion on your gaming "product," and that the magazine would be better off without them. While I agree with you from an asthetic point of view, Dungeon/Polyhedron (like nearly all magazines) _needs_ ads to survive. Generally, the fewer ads a magazine has, the less healthy it is. Take a look at InStyle or Maxim. Those magazines are LOADED with ads (and much more lucrative ads than the likes we get), and actually have fewer content pages than ad pages. That's actually quite standard in the magazine industry.
Now, I'm not saying that we want the magazines to be so dominated by ads that the ads choke out the content, but we would be very happy with more ads in the magazine, because it would mean the company (and hence the magazines we publish) are healthy and strong. When that happens, we can pay our writers and artists better, can get more staffers to produce more pages, etc., etc., etc. Our current assumption accounts for about 15 pages of ads per issue. If we get more than that, we often will add pages to the magazine, so those pages don't often crowd out "content," so to speak.
