The February Cargo: Fat with features, skinny with ads

More magazine number-crunching, this time by Kyle du Ford over at Big & Sharp. He noticed something about Cargo‘s February issue, and it wasn’t just that ski-pinup coverboy Jeremy Bloom looked Chelsea-riffic (though he does wonder, “who wears vests these days without a shirt anymore?” prompting us to wonder who ever wore vests without a shirt). Beyond Bloom’s coy glance and bulging bicep, however, du Ford noticed something…different about the content:

A ton of information. Gads of copy. Beautiful food pictures. Article after article after article… A huge feature well. Man, how did they get this much copy in a 124-page book?

Well, with merely 21 pages of advertising, there was a bit of room to be, well, liberal with words. That’s the only reason I can reckon giving a standard razor review of a few hundred words the space of –gasp! — a feature!

21 pages? Are you kidding me? Well, I’m not kidding you. I counted this twice. And while I may have miscounted (I didn’t count the AIDS PSA or the partials), that yields roughly a 78 percent edit ratio over a measely 22 percent worth of ads.

In any magazine circle, that spells bad news.

This isn’t the first time there’s been gossip about Cargo‘s performance (and as du Ford points out, an unfortunate precedent has been set with Vitals and Sync), but the skinny ad situation does raise a brow. Anyone with thoughts on the matter please send them in to fishbowlny AT mediabistro DOT com.

Let’s hope Cargo isn’t in trouble [Big & Sharp]
Cargo Magazine [Cargo.com]

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