[quote user="susanoo"]
Although I could not follow all of the logic of your response, I understood your point.
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You know, I think you knew what you wanted to understand even before you started reading my answer.
[quote user="susanoo"]In short, WHSFV can charge less to advertisers and readers but they won't because they're in a position to rip both off and get away with it.
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No, I didn't say that at all. Again you are applying your own agenda to my answer in order to infer things I am quite clearly not saying at all.
And no, we are not ripping anyone off - the cover price is the cover price, and no-one forces you to pay it, or indeed read the magazine if you think we are as evil as you clearly do. Or indeed use this forum, since by doing so you are presumably increasing our web traffic and thus allowing us to rip off the advertisers again.
[quote user="susanoo"]BTW, I did not raise a conspiracy theory. Is it something you feel you are vulnerable to ?[/quote]
That's a really rather silly response, suggesting someone is guilty by the mere fact they state their innocence, isn't it?
The conspiracy theory I referred to was the usual 'in the pocket of the advertisers' stuff we've heard a million times before. And yes, you did raise it, by suggesting we are serving the advertisers, not the readers.
I, Clare and several of the other staff have made it very clear there is no connection between advertising rates or spend and the editorial content and test results. Oh look, I've brought that up - perhaps that means exactly the opposite is true, huh?
Here's how it works - there is a budget for a certain number of editorial pages each month. The advertising department will tell the editor how many advertising pages they require, and which positions some of those ads require - eg so many right hand pages, so many left hand facing editorial, so many double page spreads, etc.
The production editor and editor then work out a flatplan to accommodate the editorial and advertising requirements, but clearly with a fixed number of editorial pages and an increasing demand for advertising pages, that means more single editorial pages facing adverts.
The only way round this is to increase the editorial pagination, but we simply don't have the editorial resources to create even more pages.
However, having accused us in your previous post of serving advertisers rather than readers, now you seem to be saying we are serving neither readers nor advertisers, although the success of the magazine in terms of circulation, profitability and the number of overseas licensed editions we have seems to suggest we serving both groups much better than the other titles in this market.
The simple facts are
a) the editorial department serves the readers - always has, and always will.
b) the advertising department serves the advertisers
c) matters such as cover price and advertising rates, not to mention editorial page allocations, are set at a much higher level than those of us posting on this forum. That's the same in any publishing company.
d) as evidence of our attitude to our readers, might I suggest you take a look at the time-stamp at the top of the post you are now reading. Would you be working unpaid at 12.30am on a Sunday morning to serve customers for whom you had the kind of contempt you suggest we have?