Things could be worse for magazines. According to PIB, there was a small increase — two percent — in print ad revenue for the industry overall. As usual for the quarter which involves fashion magazines’ September issues, a big contributor to the boost was the apparel industry, which chimed in with over 4,000 ad pages.

Finance companies, however, provided magazines with the biggest increase compared to last year, purchasing 251 more pages; a jump of a little over 15 percent.

Head over to the MPA’s site for more stats that don’t exactly scream success, but won’t completely depress you either.

Saveur‘s publisher Merri Lee Kingsly pointed us to an error in the Publishers Information Bureau numbers for the first half of 2009.

In recently released ad page and revenue statistics, PIB said the epicurean magazine was down 14.83 percent compared to the January to June numbers from last year. However, Kingsly said the stats agency had incorrectly compared its January to May numbers from 2009 to January to June numbers from 2008, resulting in a serious error.

A spokesman for the Magazine Publishers of America said the error in Saveur‘s numbers stemmed from the magazine’s June/July double issue. In 2008, ad pages and revenue from that issue were counted towards the first half of the year, but this year those numbers were counted towards the third quarter.

The error has since been corrected, and Saveur‘s real numbers for the first half of 2009 are 193.61 ad pages — up almost 11 percent from last year — and $8.3 million in reported revenue, an increase of 19.2 percent year over year. This growth despite the tough ad environment means Saveur is the fourth top earner for monthly magazines, Kingsly said.

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