Wired is a collector's item, like National Geographic. People keep back issues as if they were a set of encyclopaedias. The binded end of the magazine is always printed with horizontal stripes, so that when stacked side by side, the magazines appear as volumes. They are also numbered in a fashion that makes it easy to notice if an issue is missing.
Dansbury Litho & Printing, the east coast
commercial press that prints Wired, usually prints high quality annual
reports and commercial brochures. Wired is its first magazine customer.
The
heavy stock covers, six-color printing, and oversized pages give the reader a
feeling of a quality product.
"One of the goals was to signal to the reader that we have a higher level of content. Our magazine is more valuable - we ask more for it - meaning it has to look better than most magazines. So we didn't feel it made sense going to a magazine printer," explains John Plunkett.
For the subscriber, Wired aims to be a quality product that justifies an above-average subscription price. From an advertising perspective, Wired is a magazine that has a unusually long shelf-life, thus allowing advertisements to be viewed many times over a number of years. According to the Wired Subscriber Survey in 1994, 76% of Wired subscribers "will keep their copy forever." This is a very valuable asset for selling advertising space at a premium price.
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