Dragon Mag circulation

[dreamthief]

I was looking through issue #290 of Dragon Magazine and came across the Statement of Circulation. In twelve months, the average requested/paid circulation was about 70,000, and for the issue closest to filing date circulation was around 78,000. With a $6 cover price and even considering distribution costs etc, and not including advertising, it seems Dragon Mag is fairly healthy.

I don't have the figures for Dungeon Mag (I believe it's in the Nov/Dec 2001 issue which has gone missing as they always do when you need them).

It just makes me wonder how much Pazio paid for the mags.

Anybody has the pre-3E figures by any chance?

 

[Samothdm]

I don't have them handy, so I can't really comment on that.

However, one thing that an advertising agency (at least, a good ad agency) would look at when considering to run in a magazine is whether that magazine is audited by either the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) or the Business Publications Audit (BPA). Dragon stopped paying to have themselves audited a LONG time ago, so in the Standard Rates & Data book, there's a big message that says "Publication has not filed circulation after repeated requests" or something like that.

Dragon usually reports their AUDIENCE as opposed to their CIRCULATION. The Audience is the total people that they THINK are reading the publication, including if you let your friends or your game group read it. They like to count those people in order to price themselves higher. But, a real ad agency is going to take that audience number with a grain of salt.

According to the current SRDS (sort of a "rates bible" for all publications), the 6-month sworn circulation as reported 12/31/2001 is as follows:
Total: 55,228
Non-Paid: 0
Paid: 55,228
Subscriptions: 22,260
Single: 32,608

In case anyone is interested, according to SRDS, their current price for a full page, four-color ad is $2,975. That may be outdated now that the publication has been sold to Paizo.

 

[Mark]

The ratio of subscriptions to singles (picked up at stores, I suppose) surprises me. I would have suspected that they might have an even higher number of subscriptions.

I'm not an advertiser (at this point) but I wouldn't take too large a grain of salt on their "audience figures". As someone who has been gaming since before Dragon was even published I have no doubt that the magazine "changes hands/gets multiple viewings" often and over an extended period of time. This might not help someone advertising something that has a short shelf life but it definitely keeps the advertisers' company name in front of a lot of people.

Dungeon magazine probably gets passed around a lot less often since it contains material that the buyer might not wish to share. I'd be skeptical of "audience" figures for Dungeon that are much higher than actual sales figures.

 

[Jesse Decker]

Actually, you're both right - the 70,000 number at the top of the ownership statement in issue #290 is the number of copies printed. Go a little further down and you'll see total paid sales of just over 58,000. That's a little higher than the 56,000 that Samothdm got from the SRDS because the numbers reference different issues.

Samothdm - in the past, Dragon (like most other magazines) did quote the pass-along readership, but that hasn't been the case for several years now. If I recall correctly, it's one of the changes that Johnny Wilson made when he came to Wizards as Group Publisher. The numbers in the ownership statement (and the numbers you reference in the SRDS) quote actual numbers sold.

I honestly don't keep up with the ad rates enough to quote them accurately, but I do know that hobby gaming companies (including d20 companies) have a generous discount from the full rate.

 

[Samothdm]

Thanks for your reply, Jesse! It's always great to hear from the experts at WotC.

You are of course correct that hobby/d20 companies get a discounted rate for publications like Dragon (if not, they need to negotiate better ). And, in case it didn't come across this way, I just wanted to point out that I think Dragon (and Dungeon) are obviously the best bets for a d20 company to advertise their new product offerings. They definitely have the largest audiences in the industry - I don't think anyone would dispute that.

From a business standpoint, though, I think Dragon would do well to start having themselves be audited. It just gives them that extra little **oomph** when an agency is choosing where to advertise. I've been in the media planning side of ad agencies for over 10 years now, and there are quite honestly some agencies that will never recommend a publication that isn't audited.

Dragon is a special case in that, for a fantasy game company, it's a "must-buy." But, it's possible that Dragon could (and should) get more business from video/electronic games and even some non-game ads that target 12-24 year old men. Having that audit statement from ABC would be really helpful.

 

[Mark]

Right from the source! Thanks Jesse.

With fellas like you, Erik and Anthony so quick to respond to things around here I just don't see how some people get worried about the future of D&D or gaming...

 

[Default Name Player]

Sorry for OT -

Samothdm - Glad to see another fellow media planning person out there Only been in the business for 6 years myself.

You forgot to mention that Dragon magazine reps also need to take media planners out to lunch...and give them free stuff...

 

[Lizard]

I was looking through issue #290 of Dragon Magazine and came across the Statement of Circulation. In twelve months, the average requested/paid circulation was about 70,000, and for the issue closest to filing date circulation was around 78,000. With a $6 cover price and even considering distribution costs etc, and not including advertising, it seems Dragon Mag is fairly healthy.

Erm...not really.

When I was in college (1983->1987), the circulation was well over 100,000.

 

[Samothdm]

Glad to see another fellow media planning person out there Only been in the business for 6 years myself.

It's amazing how small this business is, isn't it?

You forgot to mention that Dragon magazine reps also need to take media planners out to lunch...and give them free stuff...

Um, yeah, right. . . In fact, for the entire time that I worked on WotC, I wasn't allowed to even TALK to anybody working at Dragon. (Note, this isn't a slam against Dragon's current employees. I have no idea if the person who instituted this policy even still works there).

That just makes no sense to me. Why shouldn't I be able to talk to them? What were they afraid of? I didn't want to talk to them from a standpoint of rates-circulation-negotiations. Rather, I wanted to talk to them about stuff like, "What can I, as a gamer with 20+ years experience, holder or a business degree in marketing, and a ad executive and media planner, do to help you with your business?"

When my team and I (almost all of us were gamers) got assigned to the WotC account, we were so excited. We figured that our gaming and ad experience would really help them to come up with some new ideas. But, instead, they would just say, "This is what we want to do. Tell us how much it will cost."

[Just want to insert here that below are my own personal opinions and are in no way a reflection of the opinions of the agency for which I work, and which will remain nameless].

Minor OT rant here, but that is just a waste of time and money. Wizards of the Coast didn't need us to tell them how much something is going to cost. There are resources where they can look that up themselves. In my opinion, they were paying us to help them build their brands. We have experience in doing this.

But, instead, they starting acting like every other client I've ever worked on, namely: "We've already decided what we want to do and don't need any input." As you can imagine, this is very frustrating.

They have a lot of great gamers and designers there, but a few of the marketing people I dealt with didn't really seem to want to partner with us to help increase their business.

Working with Hasbro Corporate could be frustrating as well. I worked with one in particular who didn't really know what these games were all about. This person would literally argue with me incessantly about things like what the target for a particular game should be (which would affect the magazines/TV shows/etc that we would advertise in). This person's thinking was, "My four-year-old son like Pokemon and Harry Potter so he is the one who will play these games." The Hasbro person didn't understand why we were targetting 12+ or 18+ Men.

Perhaps this is a topic for another thread, and it definitely covers more than just the advertising side of things.

I tried to get a discussion about the advertising side of the business going at the Green Ronin in PC Gamer! thread but didn't get a lot of responses (although both Erik Mona and Chris Pramas responded). Anyone else interested?

 

[Default Name Player]

Samothdm - Ah, spoken like a true media planner

I'm a bit disappointed though - I always thought it would be very exciting to work on the planning side for one of my hobbies, but it's disparaging to hear that it sounds like the usual agency-client relationships. It sucks when media planners get turned into glorified paper pushers for the client.

However, I agree with you on the "being audited" part in your earlier post. I always tend to be suspicious of any magazines that aren't audited and will generally not use them in any plans. Even alot of the trade magazines I had dealt with before were usually audited, and they had much lower circulations than Dragon. Reason: mainly, to cover our asses, and in my POVs to the client on why I reject a magazine, I'd generally include the lack of auditing as a reason.