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Readers' Choice Awards (siteadm) Fri, 13 Jun
Call for another scientific survey (kdenehy) Sat, 14 Jun
and Again... (cjoffe) Mon, 16 Jun
The qualified circulation business (rparker) Mon, 16 Jun

So...

Posted by: alunj
Date posted: Mon, 16 Jun 1997

Why not have a second circulation for those of us that would pay newsstand prices for your publication?

As a secondary concern, with so many stories of subscribers having lied so severely on their forms (I can add my own stories of colleagues here - also that everywhere I've worked, it's the salesmen who have the InfoWorld subscriptions, and I wasn't at a VAR), perhaps InfoWorld should reconsider the claims they pass on to their advertisers - either to confirm those claims by a better survey (as suggested above), or by finding out just what the current readership is actually composed of, and retargetting your advertising to them.

Note that we choose to read InfoWorld for the content, not for the advertising. We're grateful to the advertisers for funding it, but I don't think any of us would care if the advertisers funding it suddenly changed to advertisers that sold products we might actually buy, instead of stuff that's way out of our range!

There's a peculiar sounding (but awfully common) three-way relationship going on here - the readers subscribe to InfoWorld because it gives them the information and opinions they want to read. The information and opinions are compiled by the staff in response to their expected readership, as gauged by the demographic data in the subscriber database. The advertisers pay for the costs of producing InfoWorld because they believe this demographic data to be accurate(not necessarily because they want to be associated with the articles).

Or do they? Maybe it's like government contract bidding - everyone knows there's a lie going on, and everyone makes their own guess as to how big the lie is. The trouble is that this system screws the people who tell the truth.

Alun

Texas Imperial Software


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