Promotional Consideration: Advertising with Power, revisited

If you recall, back in November, we put up a short piece on the increasing number of ads in Nintendo Power after the magazine was handed over to Future US, the same publisher behind the official Xbox and PlayStation magazines.

Chris Slate, Nintendo Power's new editor in chief, explained the ad-bloated issues: "Love or hate the ads, their number should go down significantly over the next couple of issues as we move away from the busy holiday selling season. We saw a huge upswing in ad pages last month because more games than ever are being released right now for the red-hot Wii and DS. However, new titles will slow down midway through December, and the ads will follow suit."

So, now that we've put a few months in between us and December, has the magazine kept its promise, scaling back the number of ads in favor of delivering more news, reviews, and previews? Jump past the post break for the breakdown.

Nintendo Power (Future US),
Holiday 2007/V223

• 100 pages

• Poster ads: 2

• Two-page ads: 3

• One-page ads: 29

• 1/2-page ads: 4

Nintendo Power (Future US),
June 2008/V229

• 100 pages

• Two-page ads: 3

• One-page ads: 22

• 1/3-page ads: 1

• 1/2-page ads: 1

True to its word, the magazine has decreased its advertising content since November, though that's not saying much, considering that 37% of the Holiday issue was an ad of some sort.

This month's Nintendo Power was still 28.88% ads, not counting the magazine's contest announcements, subscription offers, and other miscellaneous pages with little useful content for the average reader. To further illustrate just how much advertisements have taken over the magazine since the Future US switch, let's compare the numbers against Nintendo Power's Nintendo-published June issue from last year.

Nintendo Power (Nintendo),
June 2007/V216

• 116 pages

• Two-page ads: 3

• One-page ads: 10

• 1/2-page ads: 1

What a difference just a year makes! Our math shows 2007's June issue ad content at only 14.22%. The magazine had 16 more pages then, too, compared to the 100 pages that has become the norm. What does it all mean? Less pages and even less content.

Whatever keeps the magazine going, we suppose ... Considering the current market for video game magazines, what with DoubleJump cutting Hardcore Gamer down from a monthly to a quarterly publication and Ziff Davis Media terminating Games for Windows altogether, we're just happy to see Nintendo Power still alive.

Promotional Consideration is a weekly feature about the Nintendo DS advertisements you usually flip past, change the channel on, or just tune out.