The Press: Hercules

The Saturday Evening Post, gigantic veteran of magazines, last week celebrated its heartiness and health by increasing its advertising rates. The reason given was increased circulation, evidenced by the following figures representing net paid circulation as certified by the Audit Bureau of Circulations:

1920-21 2,055,081

1921-22 2,150,430

1922-23 2,255,463

1923-24 2,264,982

1924-25 2,363,865

The Post has become such a landmark with the public, that uninformed persons mention with awe the possible price of a page advertisement and sometimes mention fabulous sums. For the past five years recorded above, the cost of a full-page advertisement in black and white has been $7,000; in two colors, $8,500. Under the new rates, effective beginning with the issue of Feb. 6, 1926, each of these rates is increased $500, to $7,500 and $9,000. The prices for other kinds of advertisement will be: back cover, $15,000; centre spread (two pages), $18,000; a page in four colors, $11,000; a single column, $1,875; a single line, $12.

These rates are not so high as the rates of The Ladies’ Home Journal, which charges $9,000 for a black and white page. Yet if one goes through a copy of the Post, reckoning up the gross advertising, it comes to a most soul-satisfying sum. Of course, all this money does not gointo the profits of The Curtis Publishing Co. or of Cyrus Hermann Kotzschmar Curtis. The cost of printing two and a third million copies of an advertisement is an item, and the cost of the paper for the same number of repetitions is another item; and besides it costs considerably more to produce a single copy of the Post than the nickel for which it retails (there have been instances, detected and stopped, in which many copies of the Post were purchased by enterprising merchants as a cheap way of getting old paper). So the advertiser’s money goes toward paying production and other costs. Yet the advertising must be well worth the price to the advertisers. It gives the reader much more than his nickel’s worth —and it gives The Curtis Publishing Co. a handsome profit.