Video Game ads
I recently spoke to Chris Bieniek about the evolution of video game magazines in the 90s. Chris got his start with VG&CE magazine in 1989 and would go on to edit its successor - Video Games: The Ultimate Gaming magazine. You can read the feature here.
One really interesting thing that’s touched on in the article is the importance of ads sales when it comes to video games magazines. All that additional revenue can have a huge impact on a magazine's bottom line (and its ultimate survival).
So when EGM magazine poached VG&CE’s top ad sales guy it had a cascading impact.
Chris can explain it a lot better than me. He was there for the whole thing. Here’s the story:
“If there's one thing that most people don't know about video-game magazines, it's the advertising side of things. For example, VG&CE had a very good ad sales guy named Jeffrey Eisenberg; he worked for a company that was run by his father, Jay Eisenberg.”
“Well, EGM hired Jeffrey away from us. Jay (his father) then took over ad sales for VG&CE. Now they were competing against each other. And I think it's fair to say that the elder Eisenberg didn't have the drive, the momentum or the success that his son was having at that point in his career.”
“Ad sales is a super-cutthroat business; these people would travel all over the country, wining and dining the game publishers and talking absolute shit about their competitors. And the number of pages in each issue of a magazine was mostly determined by the number of ads that were sold. So at the end of the day, if you go to the newsstand with five bucks in your hand, one magazine is 200 pages and another is 350 pages, of COURSE you're gonna buy the bigger book. At that point, nobody cared if you had better writers, or nicer layouts, or more timely information. Size mattered.”
“That's something that's never brought up in discussions about old video-game magazines. Having a good ad salesperson directly impacted the appeal of your magazine at the newsstand (because of the page count), and it directly impacted your reputation within the games industry (because of the shit-talking).”
So there you have it. And worth mentioning because by the final year of publication the ad sales in Video Games: The Ultimate Gaming magazine (TUGM), had completely tanked. The numbers below shows a quick comparison of the August 1995 issue:
Video Games (TUGM) - 100 pages. 4 ads.
GamePro - 124 pages 39 ads
Electronic Gaming Monthly - 151 pages - 59 ads
Chris Bieniek had already left by this point, and was heading up Tips and Tricks magazine - a role he kept until 2007.
