Tuesday, March 24, 2009

I Like It, But Will They?

As a reader, I really like what I think is a new feature Esquire magazine has added to its front cover: The page number for the table of contents. It's a minor issue, but I always found it a bit frustrating to have to flip through a bunch ads the magazine has packed up front to get to what I'm looking for. Really, I wish more magazines would do this.


That said, I'd be pretty upset if I were an advertiser. Isn't this basically just inviting readers to skip through ads*? The only reason I could even see the magazine deciding to do this is if there were a bunch of people like me complaining about all the ads that stood in the way of the table of contents. I know there's a wall separating editorial content and ad sales, but given this is magazine that sold an ad on its front cover, that's not quite as clear as it's been in the past. I'm surprised, then, they'd let this sort of a thing happen.

* The cover has page numbers for many feature stories, too, but they've done that in the past.

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