• Ad Age, Monday, May 1, 2006 11 AM

It's long been a bone of contention in the magazine and advertising fields: what value to place on magazines placed before readers' eyes in public spaces--doctors' waiting rooms, airports, hair salons, and so forth.  The skepticism has come mainly from the buyer side, since there's been scant hard evidence that an advertiser should pay for a reader who fumbles through a free magazine for several minutes while waiting to get on to other matters.  But a new study, co-sponsored by Time Inc. and Mediaedge:cia, has found that public-space magazines are indeed valuable, if not quite as valuable as magazines paid for by subscribers.  "The study, conducted online in January, actually found that readers in waiting rooms, beauty parlors and the like do not respond to ads as strongly as people reading newsstand or subscription copies--but that the gaps are overcome by the much greater number of people who read each public-place copy," reports Ad Age.  John Squires, co-chief operating officer at Time Inc., says, "If we're going to be charging for this and we expect our advertisers to pay for it, let's be honest, dig in, and show them what it’s worth. If we do some more work like this, we get a little bit out of this box of only valuing circulation on the basis of whether it's paid for and how it was paid for."

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