The latest issue of Melbourne Wedding & Bride is the thickest I can recall. The photo shows the magazine with a copy of Better Homes & Gardens behind it. This shows that in the space Wedding & Bride takes I could fit five or six copies of Better Homes & Gardens.
The size of Melbourne Wedding & Bride imposes handling and merchandising costs for newsagents that are greater than we have for the average magazine. It’s for this reason that I think we need to have a commercial discussion with the publisher about compensation. A magazine distributor reasonably representing its retail partners would have already done this.
Melbourne Wedding & Bride is packed with advertising. I’d expect ad rates to have increased over the years, to certainly cover the cost of the larger publication. The fixed cover price and low gross profit of 25% leaves us worse off with the larger magazine today.
I’d like to see a size trigger set for magazines. Titles thicker than a centimetre, for example, should have a retailer surcharge that is fully passed on to newsagents. While not wanting to complicate things, I’d like the surcharge to apply based on time on the shelf to more accurately compensate the retailer for engaging their assets. This would be reasonably easy to organise.
I like Melbourne Wedding & Bride, it’s a good magazine that sells well over the on-sale period. That it is in a size category of its own is what puts it on my radar today.
This is a title that should be distributed in a staggered manner as it sells AND deserves a higher margin to compensate for the space it takes to display, after all it’s one big directory of advertisement that would be extremely profitable to the publishers but pays us poorly due to the low cover price.