If you are like me, you get a half dozen “Free” subscription offers from IT magazines such as eWeek, InfoWorld etc in your e-mail or snail mail every month.

As we all know, the magazines, for the most part, make their money off of Ad revenue. Part of how they attract advertisers is their circulation or subscriber counts. Part is by demonstrating the demographics of their audience.

In order to gather that demographic information the “Free” offers are accompanied by a multipage survey that attempts to define who and what you are in terms their advertisers can digest.

Well let’s take a look at “Free”, a typical paid subscription for a year at XYZ Magazine is say $124.00. It takes me 15 minutes of my time that I bill at $500.00 per hour to a client to fill one of these surveys out, even if I cheat and just randomly select values.

So one quarter hour of $500.00 billable time is $125.00 worth of my time. Hmmmm, not so free is it? Now I don’t bill all my time, ( I would Love to!), but I don’t so even if you lower the value of your and my time drastically, it still is not a free subscription.

And discussing this topic with several co-workers and friends resulted in the not unexpected result that most of them just randomly select values on those survery as well. So the data that the magazines are collecting is useless for the most part.

So hey, Mr./Ms. Magazine editor, just send the dang thing! Or better yet, reduce your survey to one short page. I for one don’t have the time to read all the magazines I do get, including those I have paid for, so I am just chucking/deleting any more “Free” subscription offers I receive!!

Cheers,

Robert Porter