Back in September I talked about the percentage of ads in Wired magazine. Well, for the past couple of months I’ve noticed something I haven’t seen in a while: The Magazine Economic Indicator.

I first encountered the MEI back in the days of the dot com boom, way back in ‘99. At the time I subscribed to a magazine, might have been Fast Company, which tracked all the internet madness. At one point, right before the burst of the bubble, the thing was almost 1/2 inch thick!

As the bust progressed, I noticed the page count dropping. What was once hundreds of pages dwindled to under a hundred. Here was a reliable indicator of the economy.

Back to Wired: In September the magazine was 218 pages long, with 33 useless sheets (two page ads). What’s the current issue at? 116 pages. They have lost almost half of their page count!

Let’s look at the percentages. In September, 90 pages were actual content (41%). This month? 77 pages of content — up to 66% content. (Though, to be honest, many of the pages have a paragraph of text and a gigantic photo. Did I really need a full page image of a water bottle? I think not. Editorial filler.)

So, roughly, they have lost 25% of the advertisers since last September. That’s a huge decline, and is clear indicator of how bad things are. 

On the bright side, you can use Wired to determine when things are starting to get better (assuming that they don’t go under first). How do we know when the economy is improving? When their page count starts going up and not down. How well is the recovery doing? By looking at how many pages are being added per month.

I figure I can’t be any more innacurate than the economists.

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