Q) What are your ad rates for Punk Planet magazine?
A) They’re online right here.
Q) How does a person go about advertising on PunkPlanet.com?
A) By reading our web ads page, right here.
Q) What are your ad specs for the print pub?
A) They are online in the same place as the question above.
Q) What’s your circulation of the magazine?
A) Currently as of this writing (July, 2006) we are printing 16,000 copies and selling around 14,000 of those.
Q) That’s it? Zine X says they have 40,000 readers and they’ve only been around for a year. How is it that they’re selling more copies than you?
A) Well, they could be. It is possible. However, the way you worded your question leads me to believe that someone’s not being totally upfront. You see, there’s a difference between “readers” and how many magazines you’ve sold. This is an old trick in the magazine world, and one that we don’t buy into. “Readership” is supposed to be computed by multiplying your actual numbers sold by the “pass-along” readers. This is, of course, a completely arbitrary number based on how many people may or may not read each copy of the magazine that gets printed. We’ve heard everything from “double the amount you’re printing” to multiplying it by 20. It’s much more honest, in our opinion, to simply tell the one number we DO know: how many copies we’re printing and selling.
Q) Does running an ad in your magazine mean that we’ll get reviewed and have our bands featured?
A) Fuck no. This isn’t pay-for-play, regardless of how much the “industry” is moving in that direction. Paying for an ad in Punk Planet buys you exactly that: an ad in Punk Planet. We decide on our features because they’re bands or people or whatever that our writers and editors want to include in the magazine. Not because you bought an ad.
Q) Can you guarantee placement of my ad in the first 10 pages? Or how about on a right hand page? Or opposite the review of my band?
A) Sorry, we don’t do that. When you buy an ad you buy an ad in the issue you’re expecting it to run in. That’s all we can guarantee. Our ads are pretty cheap, compared to others in the industry. If you want to increase your chances of your ad running near a specific feature or section, you could always buy more ads.
Q) But it looks like ads just don’t go in randomly. Is there any logic to how ads go in?
A) Sure, but it’s minimal. Ads are placed vaguely following this logic: full page ads go in, when possible, where there is a page opposite editorial (most of the time these pages are right hand pages). Half-page ads flow into the book starting at the front until they peter out. Smaller fractional ads follow, with the smallest ending up the furthest back. Yes, you can pull up issues of the magazine that don’t follow this logic. But that still doesn’t mean that we guarantee placement.
Q) I’m indy at heart, but on a major label that wants to advertise in PP. Can you bend the rules, just for me?
A) Nope. We don’t really care who you are, we just don’t accept ads directly from major labels. When you put out your independent side project, give us a call back. But for now we want to remain free of major-label ad money. Why open the floodgates and push out all the cool, small labels that we’ve always worked with? (Besides, if you’re that indy at heart, you’ll do something else we can hype, soon enough.)
