RE: Placement of index and TOC

["Fred Ridder" <docudoc -at- hotmail -dot- com>]

There are actually perfectly logical and practical reasons for the oddly
numbered (or unnumbered) advertising pages in magazines.

If you're talking about multiple-page spreads for a single advertiser,
it's almost certain that the pages are not printed by the magazine.
It is extremely common for advertiser to print at their own expense
huge numbers of copies of their multi-page ads to be used as magazine
inserts. These pages are shipped directly to the magazine's bindery
and never come close to the magazine's printing presses. The fee
charged by the magazine for binding in a pre-printed insert is a small
fraction of the cost of a page printed from the advertiser's artwork.
The advertiser gets the economies of scale from doing *huge*
press runs, pluss they have full control over the printing quality at
the source rather than having to supervise each placement. In some
magazines that target a demographic with lots of disposable income
(Vanity Fair and most fashion magazines are the ones that come to
mind most readily), I think you'd find that less than 30% of the pages
are actually printed by the publisher; the rest are all advertiser-printed
inserts.

Another common practice is for magazines to do regionalization or
other customization of the advertising content by binding in different
sets of advertising pages. Subscribers in New York may receive one
set of eight advertising pages, while subscribers in California get a
different set of sixteen ad pages, and people buying the magazine
on a newsstand get twelve ad pages that are different yet again.
A similar technique is used to allow advertisers to test the
effectiveness of their campaigns by presenting different ads for
the same product, often by means of coded toll-free phone
numbers or URLs.

The ting you have to remember is that magazines are not about
readers--they are all about advertisers. Magazines only care about
readers because larger circulation numbers allow them to charge
more for their advertising pages. Just take a look at all those
discount (or even free) subscription offers that cost way less than
the mailing cost. How can magazines afford to offer them? Simple:
because the bigger circulation numbers let them bump up the ad
rate and earn back many times the cost of printing and mailing the
extra copies.

This battle was lost at least 20 years ago.

My opinions only; I don't speak for Intel.
Fred Ridder
Intel
Parsippany, NJ