September Magazines: "The Issue" or "The Issue for Ads"?

I have a confession.  I love fashion magazines.  And not the high-fashion, editorial ones; I'm talking the flashy, exciting-looking ones that are obviously targeted for younger women.  So obviously I was excited for all the September issues to arrive at my door a few weeks ago.  I even got the more high-fashion ones.  It is, after all "The Issue" of the year.

Don't you just want to dive in to these bad boys?

Now, I am never one to really pay too much attention to ads.  I mainly just flip through them until I get to the content.  But as I was reading, I realized that I was flipping a lot more pages than usual and it got me wondering: how much of the September issues are actual content and how much is advertisements?  Certainly the much anticipated giant-sized issues would be jam packed with addicting fashion content, right? So I decided to find out.

First, I cut out all of the pages that had an ad on both sides of the page, but I noticed that half, if not more, only had an ad on one side of the page.  So, for every two ads I cut out one page.  Yes, I had to cut out actual content, believe me there was careful deliberation on which pages were to be cut (mostly, though, were the contents pages and the credits...and maybe a few pages that didn't really interest me) : ).

I was left with this:

See those loose pages? Those are all the ads in each magazine.

Now, for each magazine I did a few things, I found the percentage of ads (nerd alert!) per issue and also took note the type of ads.  Does Vogue have more of a certain type of ads compared to Marie Claire?  Here's what I found:

People's Style Watch

Of its 328 pages, 55% were ads.  

Glamour

386 pages, 56.7% ads.

Marie Claire

430 pages, 52.6% ads.  Marie Claire had the lowest percentage of ads of the lot.  I was thinking this could be because Marie Claire leans more towards more of a lifestyle magazine instead of solely being a fashion magazine.

Harper's Bazaar

 600 pages, 60% ads.

Elle

Now we're really getting into the heavy hitters.  658 pages, 62% ads.

InStyle (My personal favorite)

716 pages, 59.5% ads.

And finally,

Vogue

With a whopping 902 pages, 64.75% of it was ads.

Notice a pattern?  It seems that the more pages that a magazine boasts that it has, the higher percentage of ads it contains.  Now ,that being said, the 65% of ads in Vogue still leaves 318 pages of content, which is more than the 147 pages of content in People's Style Watch.  The most pleasant surprise was InStyle.  InStyle has always been one of my favorite magazines, especially around fall time.  And for being one of the issues with the most pages this month, I was delighted that it had the same amount of ads as some of the smaller magazines. It was also the only one I actually struggled with what one-sided pages to cut out.

Vogue did have the greatest amount of pages, but it had the biggest amount of advertisements.  

Random tidbit: Harper's Bazaar had a huge amount of jewelry ads, 37 (compered to Glamour's measly 7).  I was thinking this could be maybe because Harper's Bazaar is more geared towards older women, and older women...can afford more jewelry? I don't really know, but I thought it was interesting.  Also, Vogue the only magazine I had to buy, as I subscribe to the rest (thank you Coke rewards).  Another thing that I thought was kind of interesting, most of the ads were in the front and became less frequent the further you got into the magazine.  

I should point out that I fully plan on recycling all the magazine carnage I was left with, and I made sure that everyone in my house had a chance to read each one before a cut it up.  In the end I was left with this:

Makes you think doesn't it?  More than half of every magazine we read is made up of advertisements.  Are we buying the coveted September issues because they have an increased amount of content, or is it because it's been heightened by all the magazine companies, and in turn the ad companies? 

What do you think about the amount of advertisements in fashion magazines?  What is your favorite magazine?