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Comment by hayksaakian | Hacker News Reader

"The average British woman spends about £279 on beauty and cosmetics but she spends about a third more, £394 on technology products. By comparison the magazines she reads gives about 20 times as many column-inches to cosmetics than they do for tech. The disconnect between how the glossy mags choose to fill their pages and how British women actually spend their money suggests that traditional publishers are out of touch with their readership. Women spend more on smartphones than men, they spend one and a half times as much on technology and influence 57% of new technology purchases. The glossy mags have yet to acknowledge that women are now fully involved as technology consumers."

The most damning evidence

It makes me think that these magazines are not actually designed to optimally interest their readers, but simply to grab their attention and then mold it to their advertisers interests.

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It makes me think that these magazines are not actually designed to optimally interest their readers, but simply to grab their attention and then mold it to their advertisers interests.

The whole point of the editorial content in trade publishing is to sell advertising pages.

Back when I was a columnist for Computer Shopper (in the UK, circa 1999-2005, during the golden autumn of the computer magazine publishing era -- before direct PC sales over the internet gutted it) the ABC audited circulation of the mag was around 135,000 readers (multiply by 5 for an equivalent US readership). Cover price was on the order of £2.35, so you could expect revenue of £317,000-odd per issue from paid subscribers/store customers. Around 120 pages consisted of editorial content, plus up to 550 pages of advertising. (This ratio holds in the US, too, where to take advantage of printed matter bulk postal rates magazines had to have no less than 20% editorial content mixed in with the ads.)

I don't have exact revenue figures, but a half-page black and white ad in CS sold at the time for roughly £2000. So, ignoring the premium for colour and blow-in ads, we can approximate the advertising revenue to £2.2M per issue. In actual fact, colour ads sold for a lot more, so the revenue per issue would be closer to £3M.

The take-home here is that at most 14% of the magazine's revenue came direct from the readers -- indeed, the readers were probably getting the colourful 650-page object for the cost of printing alone. The remaining 86% -- or more -- of the magazine's revenue came from advertising.

Now, from a business perspective, whose interests do you expect to weigh more heavily on the mind of the publisher -- the readers, or the advertisers?

I was going to say: Since technology sales are higher, why aren't technology companies advertising more? But the markup on cosmetics (scented water with fancy labels) is huge, so the cosmetics companies have much more money to spread around in advertising.

People would likely forget about cosmetics to some degree if they weren't advertised so much, they are pure luxury.

Technology provides functionality (beyond luxury) used in everyday life, so it doesn't have to advertise as much. Cosmetics have to advertise to just stay alive.

Yeah, but women and men view the world differently. In general women place more emphasis on aesthetic things, whereas guys are more into fixing things / how they work. I am sure there are loads of counter examples, but as a general thing it quite easy to see.

Sorry but that's a pretty throwaway opinion, and potentially offensive, without a study or two to back it up.

That's just not right on your part.

My sister, when researching baby monitors, had to resort to male-dominated forums. She was interested in the technical details and experiences of these before buying, but women-forums only ever covered aesthetics and feelings towards the topic.

You could say my example is anecdotal and worthless, but what I am describing is a large statistical pool with both sides represented. And this isn't exactly news, you can be as offended as you'd like, but every single area of our society barring the higher echelons of science tells us this same story.

The fact that you think it's offensive makes you the offender. I should think most of the world couldn't care less. Myself included, it's just a matter of interests.

Disclaimer: I know every rule has plenty of exceptions.

The offense is in attributing it to intrinsic differences between men and women. If you can supply some information that your sister's baby-monitoring experience was due to natural differences, vs., for example, conditioning by advertising, then that would be helpful.

I find your view on what is offensive fundamentally wrong.

Noting an arbitrary difference, like say "those ten guys are very interested in that woman's behind, while those ten women are clearly focussing on what this man is saying" is just observation (and not a reflection of my real world view, merely an example). Anyone who attributes negativity to either of these observations are betting offensive.

I should think aesthetics and personal feelings with regards to baby monitors can be helpful, in my example however, it wasn't. You chose to think it negative the female dominated forum judged differently than a male dominated one, if that's the case you are offending, not me.

I agree with you that in our age this is driven to exasperation because of the way everything in modern life seems to be so exasperated, as if exasperation itself is being marketed ... but this is off topic.

w.r.t cosmetics and aesthetics, don't forget that humanity invented cosmetics and jewellery way before most of the practical technologies. Whether that was a male (warrior paintings) or female thing, I don't know.

"luxury", as you put it, is what makes us humans, do the useless, for the sake of it, create cultures around that stuff. We have that strive deeply embedded inside us.

My hypothesis is that there's a more important factor. Cosmetics companies' expected return on an ad in a women's magazine is higher than tech companies' because of the focus.

For a tech company women are at best 50% of their target market. For a cosmetics company, women are the market. Their Excel sheets just show they can bid higher on the ads than tech.

I'd hazard to guess that cosmetics are closer to the impulse-buy zone and enjoy a larger availability.

You can walk in any supermarket / drugstore and find a cosmetics selection at which point advertising influence kicks in. You are familiar with the advertised brands in the offering and more likely to buy them.

Tech on the other hand is a $300 upward proposition a peace. That's far outside the impulse buy zone, which is why advertising this works differently. Much more product placement and bundled distribution channels (phone shops) in play here.. and caries.

You nailed it on the mark-up.

Also, ad sales in print computer magazines fell off a cliff after 2001 and never recovered. (Last time I looked, the ad page count in CS had dropped to about 200 pages, from a peak of nearly 600 pages.)

The drop was due to (a) lots of the smaller PC OEMs merging or going bust (a mag could only sell so many 12-24 page glossy advertising segments to Dell or HP), (b) the rise of internet advertising on the back of home broadband (over a 56K modem ads were painful; with 512K and up broadband they were tolerable and far more effective), and (c) dwindling profit margins.

Oh, also CS had two distinct customer bases: the hardcore folks who bought it for the specialist columns (the UK mag, unlike the Ziff-Davis Computer Shopper, had stuff like assembly language programming tutorials and an Atari ST enthusiast's corner as late as 2004) and who propped up the ABC circulation figures by subscribing (and whose ABC figures in turn were used by sales to convince advertisers that the magazine was worth purchasing space in), and the newsstand casuals, who wanted a new PC, would buy an issue for the ads, buy their PC, then never buy another copy. And of these latter, according to market surveys, only 15% ever installed any software on their machine: they bought from OEMs with Windows and Office pre-installed along with a bunch of not-quite-crapware, and used what they'd bought as-is.

The former vanished first, to places like Slashdot, Hacker News, and more recondite corners of the web. And the latter dried up as google made it easier to find cheap PCs via the internet.

Its worth noting that ad spend is a functin of deep pockets, no relevance or general importance to society. One historical comparison is that during the financila crisis, the Auto industry's ad spend plummeted and the top TV advertiser became Mobile phones. The importance of auto's, however, has generally remained unchanged. Its just that advertising is a key element in the business model of soem industries and is less in others. Clearly, given the markups and the insecurities preyed upon by the industry, Beauty products are heavily reliant on ads for both sales and luxurious margins.

It's ridiculous to state "The importance of auto's, however, has generally remained unchanged." because car sales nearly halved between 2007 and 2009. New cars (and advertising of them) were objectively pretty much irrelevant during that time.

A source for illustration: http://www.macrotrends.net/1372/auto-and-light-truck-sales-h...

I meant something more akin to "miles driven" as a benchmark for utility/importance [0]. Yours is a good clarification and qualification, however.

______

2010> 2,648,456

2009> 2,633,248

[0] http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2010/vm...

It's like what people say about Facebook, Google etc - if the service is free (or like here heavily subsidised), you're not the user, you're the product.

Is money spent relevant though ? I spend more on car insurance, gas and other maintenance fees than on entertainment, and really don't care about cars as long as mine doesn't break. A lot of women might have as little interest in the next Samsung phone.

Those stats are pretty much useless.

Technology is more expensive. Hey, women spend more on cars than cosmetics, should they include car columns too? Buying a laptop, an iPhone and a tablet or something will cost way more than a year's worth of make up, doesn't say anything about a person's real interests.

Also, the average British woman is not the average Women's magazine reader. It's more likely that readers of women's magazines 1. don't spend as much on technology, or 2. if they do, it's simply the case of buying an expensive smartphone or whatever to listen to music or browse Facebook.

The amount of money you spend on something does not equal your interest in it.

Yes, but if women want to read about technology they can buy a technology magazine. How much of Men's magazines column inches are given to tech?

> How much of Men's magazines column inches are given to tech?

As a rule, shit loads.

Currently, tech magazines for men is nothing fun to women.

In majority, women want artistic fun rather then numerical fun.

Again, in majority, women has no interest on benchmark number stuffs, and more interested in which app look more beautiful. Such as "Best sexy looking app top 10" rather than "World fastest super-computer top 10".

In other words, their behavior has not been changed. Only the medium has been changed. It was fashion and beauty stuffs before, and now it just expanded to electronics.

1950 called. They want their worldview back.

Judging from the OP, he's right and you're living in lala-land.

Ie - it could be a case of major conspiracy on the part of publishers (who are all women btw) to keep their readers away from tech. Or they could simply be giving their readers what they want.

Or there could be an unfilled niche.

If (masses of) women really had a need like that, they'd buy the current tech magazines - it wouldn't fit the niche perfectly, but it would at least partly fulfill that need.

They don't. Which is evidence that there is no such unfilled niche.

Or, much more likely, they aren't interested in the male focus of said tech magazines. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6738657 for a quick look at the covers of the tech magazine T3. Are you saying the average woman would really want to read a tech magazine with that sort of focus?

We're not talking CACM here; we're talking tech magazines that, for the longest time, celebrated conference booth babes.

If what you say is true, then all the world's women with the desire for reading tech would flock to the few tech magazines that have less of "that sort of focus", they exist. This would cause these "non-booth-babed" magazines to have a disproportionally large amount of women buyers, which they would see immediately... but it's not happening.

Reality is that which doesn't go away if you disbelieve or dislike it.

Reality being that which doesn't go away if you dislike it, I recommend you look carefully at those supposed tech magazines with “less” of the young male focus that you claim exist. You'll find that they don't, really, outside of quasi-academic magazines like CACM. Even there, it's hard. How many women are on staff? How many of the articles are written by women? How much do the articles focus on metrics, measurements, and numbers as opposed to usability? I really like reading AnandTech, but as a tech magazine that isn't interested in booth babes, it is still deeply focussed on the male interest and experience with tech, as the masthead (http://www.anandtech.com/home/about) with it's conspicuous lack of women on staff indicates.

Reality being that which doesn't go away if you dislike it, the reality is that there are no mainstream tech/gear magazines—online or print—that don't use a hypothetical young male as the primary audience for that magazine, doing a disservice to both those young men and the young women who might be interested but aren't interested in the editorial slant involved.

Reality being that which doesn't go away if you dislike it, you're a guy—as am I—and we don't actually get to say that something we like is not sexist in its nature. There are things that I will read that I know are sexist (and not care that they are because I want to read them anyway), but I don't get to pretend that they aren't sexist just because I like them.

Reality, indeed.

As I said above, "it wouldn't fit the niche perfectly, but it would at least partly fulfill that need".

If they aren't buying the currently best-fitting magazines (even though they just partially fit the need), then they are showing with their wallets that they don't really want it; and the magazines are completely right to do as they do now instead of throwing resources to serve a nonexistent/tiny market.

If all the women buyers would go to the magazine which currently has the least "male slant", then they'd be 90% of the audience for that magazine, which the publisher would immediately see and they'd get attention.

If noone prints anything even remotely acceptable but the readers would really want it - then they'd get that need filled on online media. Is there a booming audience of women tech bloggers writing for women readers and getting huge audiences + ad income that would justify targeting a magazine directly at that?

There will be articles written by women for women only if they actually put their money where their mouth is - if someone (+ millions like them) are not going to buy the resulting magazine, then saying "there should be a mag like that" is empty talk. Even if it's unfair and sexist, if the buyers aren't there then such magazines don't have a reason to exist - that's reality.

Please have a look at gender readers of Anand Tech (last I checked site with zero sex content): http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/anandtech.com

There are just no women reading it. So you might consider the possibility, that maybe - just maybe, women are just not into this stuff. And that women publishers are savvy enough to know what their readers want covered.

It's sad that all women came at work, and all men come at home or school (roughly same with home)

Anyway IMO, Alexa stats are not that much trustworthy…

It is not red-women, green-men, you are reading it wrong.

Depends. And in my experience, that's all pretty bollocks.

My wife reports to me that if she wants to buy a copy of Android Magazine she has to shoulder aside men who are much larger than she, and fish among the magazines about fishing, cars, "Lad's Mags" (ugh (her words)), and similar things.

"Not fun" (direct quotation).

Exactly. Hell, I (as a upper middle class young male) get annoyed when trying to find a tech magazine on the shelves. Hidden amongst a dozen other things, and usually a terrible selection. Sigh... Not that it matters, my favourite magazine (Atomic MPC) that I subbed to for 5 years folded into PC Authority :(

Ok, so that's a message to retailers that they might get more sales by rearranging magazines on their shelves - how do we get this message to them?

Have a look at the front covers of T3 magazine some time...

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=t3+magazine&tbm=isch

There's a theme there.

That's a tech magazine, even if the cover doesn't imply that...

I know it's a tech magazine. I'm just somewhat flummoxed what the attractive busty woman on the front of every magazine has to do with iPhones or whatever.

The theory is that seeing them close together, will cause an association in the (assumed male) reader's mind, between the qualities of the attractive sexy model and the product, so that when the reader sees the product in the future, he will be attracted to it on a subconscious level, and thus more likely to buy it ... or in other words, "sex sells".

A reasonably large amount, ranging from cool toys to the latest apps and random websites they've come across. Add on a lot of technology magazines may as well be men's magazines due to the content focus, tonality and usage of scantily clad women caressing the latest tech products.

Or I could buy Playboy. The tech and music coverage in there is very good. Despite being a “men's” magazine in the most direct sense, the breadth of coverage (music, movies—both new releases and home video, video games, automotive tech, men's fashion, and technology in general, plus the politics, interviews, reporting, and fiction) is generally good. GQ also has fairly good broad-based coverage. A couple of other magazines that aren't strictly men’s magazines but have a male editorial slant do much the same (VF and Rolling Stone).

Men's magazines tend to cover far broader interests than women's magazines.

Tech magazines, on the other hand, almost exclusively cater to a young male audience.

British women probably spend thousands on petrol but I doubt they want to read about it.

It makes me think technology items are just too damn expensive. Phones and the contracts associated with them are more than a tad expensive. How much are we paying just to stay in contact with each other?

Technology items are dirt cheap. A white label tablet with decent specs is 100$, a no name android phone 150$, decent gaming PC - 500$ ... its the fashionable tech items that are expensive. And the abusive carrier practices.

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