The title “Do Magazines Still Count” and the post definitely came across the wrong way. I just wanted to know how many people purchased magazines using the poll (which I now know is pretty impossible) and that’s why I titled the post the way I did it was meant to be a play on words, I wanted to “count” the votes, not mean are magazines still relevant which is how it looked. For those who knew me they knew I wasn’t meaning to have a go at the magazine industry as its the industry I flipping work for so why would I do that? Thing is it was already all over the internet and too late, the f*ck up was already out there.

So what im saying is sorry!

BMX has a pretty good off-line, in print media presence with everything from small zines being distributed out of lunch boxes to full colour print magazines such as the ones pictured on the left; Ride UK, Dig, BMX Plus, Freedom, Soul, Zwanzig, Ride US, 2020 and Cream. Some of these magazines have been out since the year dot but with online sites such as thecomeup, defgrip, vital, streetphire and magazines themselves having their own blogs, it started to become obvious a few years back that the change over from buying a magazine off the shelf to just loading up the site with the latest news had almost sealed the fate of the offline print market.

Now one aspect of BMX that effects us all both off-line and on-line is advertising. Pretty much every site and definitely every magazine has an advert of some description on/in it. Its a well known fact that a magazine couldn’t go to print without companies paying for adverts which goes towards paying for the printing, designing, photographers and reporters and anyone else who is involved somewhere along the chain in the publishing game. Its also a well known fact that places like TCU makes money from its advertisers allowing people like Adam22 to be able to do what he does and not have to work some job he hates just to do things he loves, hell if you could have thought of the idea a few years ago to just blog about peoples videos and what the companies are up to and could make some solid income from it you would have jumped at the chance, if you like that sort of thing.

When you’re wanting to advertise in a magazine the publishers come up with some figures which reflect roughly on sales of the title you’re looking to advertise in, these figures are derived in a number of different ways. One way is “print run” which means the number of magazines that are printed but this doesn’t necessarily give an accurate figure of how many get sold. Another way is worked out by the number of subscriptions plus orders from shops/news agents but this also doesn’t give a true representation of how many end up in the readers hands and how many get scrapped or sent back to the publishers.

What im wanting to do is try and get an accurate enough figure of the ACTUAL amount of magazines that end up in the readers hands who have went out and purchased a magazine either by subscription or by just getting one from their local shop/news agent. Now one thing we’ve got to take into account is even this figure won’t be anywhere near precise because not everyone who buys a BMX magazine goes online but you could guess around 90% of them should do but then out of that 90% not everyone will go on streetphire where the voting is happening, probably only 25-35%. But hopefully we can get TCU and Defgrip to let people know about this and then them people can cast their vote along side the magazines they buy and eventually in a month we can get a rough figure of who buys what and what kinda numbers relate to them. Even then this whole thing may fall flat on its arse but I want to give it a go because it would be interesting to see just how many magazines end up in the hands of the people they are made for.

The important bit

So what you need to do is look over to the right hand side of this site and you’ll see the list of BMX magazines. You’ll be able to vote for more than one magazine because chances are you may actually buy more than one title. But I only want you to vote if you actually purcahse the magazine yourself, this means you don’t just go round your mates or to the shop and read it there, you have to actually pay for the magazine either be it from subscription or off the shelf. Once you’ve submitted your votes don’t vote again as we want to get as accurate a result as we can possibly try. In a month from now we will close the poll and see what the numbers say.

The more support we can get on this from spreading the word and putting it out there on your blogs hopefully the more accurate the figures can be. It would be interesting to see just how many people buy magazines after hearing all this doom and gloom about the in-print industry slowly disappearing and going fully online.

So what you waiting for? Get your vote counted…

Note: If you don’t see a magazine that is currently in print that you think should be listed then put it in the comments or email us here hman [at] streetphire.co.uk