U.S. major mags heavily discounting off rate cards

There is a lot of speculation and very little fact about the discounting of magazine rate cards; publishers naturally hold such information very close to their waistcoats and it is the rare publisher who doesn't say he stays on card, but his competitors...

However, a comparison of what U.S. publicly traded magazine companies tell their shareholders about annual ad sales, compared with data about pages sold at the published rate card price can provide a rough calculation of how deep discounts are. A very useful story in MediaDaily News reports the following information concerning the two, largest publicly traded publishers in the U.S.:

(The Time Inc. ad sales data excludes online. The Meredith Corp. data was obtained by stripping out broadcast revenues from a combined figure. The story also did a similar calculation for Hachette Filippachi, which has not yet published 2008 year-end results and American Media, for which data is somewhat more speculative. Its estimates, however is that Hachette discounts 40 - 50% and AMI has an average discount of 73% off its published rate cards.)

The story also said that in the latter quarters of 2008, as the recession began to bite, companies' discounting had accelerated.

We do not know of similar Canadian data.