Articles Drowning in a Sea of Ads

You're waiting in line to check out at Kroger and pick up a magazine. You begin to flip through it. Ad. Ad. Ad. Ad. Ad. Ad. By the time you get to the substance of the magazine it's time for you to ring up your items. This seems to be the situation with most magazines that we see nowadays. Sometimes it even appears that there are more ads than articles. A well known example of this would be Vogue. Pick up any issue of Vogue and you'll have to flip through seemingly never ending Dolce & Gabana, Ralph Lauren, Dior and Prada advertisements. In fact, Vogue has increased their number of advertisements more than 4.5% since 2012. All of the ads are very similar content-wise and all make sense for the magazine they are in (as they should be considering that it costs $173,075 for one full page color advertisement.) The ads are primarily clothing designers, large department stores, and makeup and beauty brands.

On the other hand, there are magazines that are more content-driven, as opposed to ad-driven. A great example of this is National Geographic. Sure, there are some advertisements, it'd be difficult to find magazines today that didn't, but they don't draw away from the content of the magazine. If you were to open a National Geographic, you wouldn't be so bombarded by ads that you would be deterred from finding the actual articles that the issue has to offer.  What's interesting is the difference in the subject matter of the articles and the items that are advertised. In National Geographic you can find ads for perfume, clothes, shoes, jewelry, makeup, and designers. While the content of Vogue appears to be influenced by the advertisers that are featured in it, National Geographic is obviously not adjusting their content to pertain to the ads in the magazine. 

I do think that it's possible to have a balance of content and ads. National Geographic is evidence of this because they are much more focused on the articles and stories which is the original purpose of a magazine.