How magazines make their money

When purchasing a magazine, the profit from those sales makes money towards the magazine company. This profit however is very little in this type of sale; it’s called a single copy sale, once you work out the price it costs to make the magazine, the cost to transport the magazine, and the commission the magazine company must pay the newsstand company for providing space to sell their magazine.

Magazines make a lot more money on one to one when people sign up for subscriptions. This is because they are getting rid of at least one of the intermediaries and are able to get their magazine directly to the customer with no trouble.

It varies for a lot of different genres of magazines on how they get their source of money and what makes them their most profits. Music and lifestyle magazines are the main magazines who get most of their money from advertising, they would not survive if there was no advertising.


This is NME's rate card for their magazines. A rate card is a document that is provided by any print publication, in this case a magazine, showing the organisations rate for advertising. It may also include more information and details like the one above about demographics, policies, additional feed and artwork requirements.