How hard is it to make your own magazine?

How much does magazine publications make?

• I was just wondering how much these magazine make for every magazine that they sell. Say Vogue magazine cost $4.99, how much would they take in as profit?

• Answer:

  If you are asking how much money a magazine makes per copy on the newsstand, that is a different question than overall profitability of a magazine. There are supply chain economics involved. There are 4 links in the chain: the publisher, the distributior, the wholesaler and the retailer. Each one gets a cut or percentage, with the publisher getting the least. Percentages will vary by vendor. The publisher pays the other links through sales at the cover price - in this case $4.99. The retailer receives $4.99 and gives a percentage of it back to the wholesaler and keeps the rest, the wholesaler does the same to the distributor and the distributor to the publisher. I cannot speak to this specific example, but let's say that the publisher makes $0.50 per copy. On top of that, there are production costs (paper & printing) - and the industry average for newsstand sales is around 30% right now. So - if Vogue were to put out 100,000 copies, they would only sell around 30,000. BUT - they paid to print 70,000 which were not sold and were wasted (given back up through the chain as a "return" - each link in the chain either has to provide the next link above them with the percentage of the cover price or a "return"). If it costs $0.20 per copy to print one copy, here is what the economics would look like: 100,000 x $0.20 per copy = $20,000 costs 30,000 x $0.50 profit = $15,000 gross profit $20,000 costs - $15,000 gross profit = -$5,000 (net loss) On top of that - there are promotional costs at the newsstand. Whenever you see a magazine "highlighted" at a newsstand or bookstore - whether it is on an "end cap" (end of an aisle special display), a "spinner" (a free standing rack that spins) or at an airport or train station where the magazine is papered across a wall in a display - that all costs major money. Placement at grocery store check outs costs money too - it's called an RDA - Retail Display Allowance. The profit per copy on these newsstand copies can be cents to a loss depending on all these factors. There is some profit to subscriptions, depending on how many are sold and at what rate versus all of the production costs mentioned above, the postage to mail them (which is quite high), the promotional dollars used to acquire and retain subscribers and the costs to fulfill the orders and maintain the subscriber database. Most magazines are not "circulation driven", but are "advertising driven" - where the majority of the profit is made (I would say around 70% essentially) from the placement of advertising at tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per page depending. Very high priced magazines are circulation driven (mostly business and trade magazines considered essential to people's work) and very low priced magazines - like Vogue which often sells for $12 for 12 issues - are advertising driven. The profitability of a magazine depends on many factors. I hope this helps.