How do I create and publish a magazine?

What is the avg. cost range to create and publish a print ad in a magazine from start to finish?

• So from the concept of the print ad, to the design to the photography used to the production and the cost of the space within the mag. Is there a way to determine an avg. range of what a single ad would cost in today's environment? Thanks!

• Answer:

  You could do something like this if you somehow had data on every single print ad (which doesn't exist) but the resulting number would be non-informative. Each of the variables mentioned in the question involve sliding scales of pricing. Billing rates vary with the relative age, size, reputation, industry focus, and geographic market of the agency in question. The agency concepting (also know as ideation) phase doesn't always take the same amount of time or involve the same number of people. To get to the ideation phase, there is sometimes years of accumulated research that is very difficult to amortize. Likewise, if an individual ad exists as part of a larger campaign, being one of ten or more ads, that individual ad may only take ten minutes to conceive. Another ad may go through fifty rounds of revision between the agency and client, but run as a single execution. Likewise with design, creative departments vary in size and scale. Photographers are also priced individually by their experience, skill, market, and team size. The cost of running the ad varies depending on the specific magazine, its reach, its attractiveness to a particular advertiser, as well as how large the ad placement is in "column inches" and where the ad appears in the magazine. The other problem is that it's very difficult to pre-judge the ROI of a particular ad, so unlike with google ads where you can say "I sell each widget for $3.00 so I will pay up to $2.90 to acquire a new customer via converted click", there is no way to gauge how many readers of a publication will actually see your ad, of them which percentage will do what you're asking, and if/when they do convert it's very difficult to measure if they made the purchase based on the ad. You may be left thinking, "Why would anyone ever run a print ad, then?!" The answer may live somewhere on this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases