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I recently bought a computer magazine, it had an article
I was interested in, so I decided, what the heck, let's
buy this issue of this magazine. I paid $6.99 for
it and I thought, well, look how thick it is, has to have
a lot of information in it and I'll probably end up enjoying
it because it is a computer related magazine, so what the
heck, I mean, it's only $6.99.
I decide to read the magazine later, I was busy updating
this webpage and a bunch of other webpages I'm the webmaster
of, so I was busy, but finally I complete my work for
the day and I settle down to read this article.
It Was a very good article, 2 pages long, had some interesting
information in it, but it only took me a few minutes to
read. I turn my attention to the rest of the magazine,
starting at page one, working my way through each page.
It only took me about 30 minutes to read through what
I thought to be a thick magazine with lots of content.
I could have just thought, "You're a genius, who
needs those speed reading courses," but I wasn't
feeling that egotistical and I started to think back to
what I read.
Page one, Table of Contents, Page 2 advertising, page
3 the beginning of a tech article, Page 4 another advertisement.....The
light bulb went off...it wasn't the fact that I read fast
or retained the information so quickly, I suddenly realized
it wasn't my intellectual prowess at all, no, it was the
fact that this thick magazine I paid for was just littered
with advertising, in fact, there were as many pages of
advertising as there were pages of information.
This "thick" magazine, suddenly started to look
really thin to me, and that $6.99 I paid for it, suddenly
started to seem like a lot of money. The few pages
of content in this magazine wasn't even left completely
alone, instead there was a series of small almost "banner"
like ads on the pages that contained the stories.
If you removed all the advertising from the magazine,
set up the pages just with content, the magazine would
have been about 10 pages long, instead of the whopping
203 pages it turned out to be. I paid $6.99 for
10 pages of content...it gets worst, trust me it does.
How does it get worst, well, this magazine was doing a
review of hardware, the advertisers that were in the magazine
were computer companies. It started to get me thinking
about the honesty of the reviews. After all, if
you were computer company would you promote in a magazine
that said your computer was awful? Would this computer
magazine bite the hand that feeds it? Well, these
are all questions that came into my mind and suddenly
the value of the 10 pages of content came into question
for me. Did I just pay $6.99 for a biased 10 pages
of content? Umm, lets go over why this is wrong:
- I
paid for content not for advertising
- So
much advertising biased the articles in the computer
magazine - why would I trust someone's opinion on hardware
or software when the advertisers are the very companies
getting reviewed?
- The
magazine is double-dipping, making the reader pay, making
advertisers pay, they're getting paid twice for the
same useless content.
I feel as if that $6.99 was thrown away, I could have
given it away and I would have had a better feeling about
it. The thing is, if that was a magazine that had
200 pages of content, I would have probably paid $10 maybe
more for it, because it would have been worth it, but
this, just was such an egregious example of someone trying
to squeeze out as much money as they can for 10 pages
of useless biased content!
From now on, I only stick to internet based information,
you could find it all online and you can get it free at
least. I can live with advertising on a webpage
because I don't have to pay to get into the webpage, a
win win situation there, but the second I start paying
for something I don't want to see one ad! |
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