Are free business magazines worth it?

March 30, 2005 8:13 AM

Are free business magazines worth it? Magazines.com and a couple of other websites are offerring free magazines to "qualified subscribers." Has anyone signed up before? Do these magazines generally have valuable content or are they created just to gather names and addresses for advertisers?
posted by yevge to media & arts (7 comments total)

Those free ones make their money on advertising, but the also will pass on your address to most of the businesses that advertise with them, so you can expect to get a lot more invitations to seminars, catalogues and other stuff. It's great if you like getting stuff in you inbox, although it can be a nuisance at home so use your work address.

I've given my name to a few in my time and it at least made me seem more important in the eyes of some coworkers who would fawn over copies of magazines that I rarely went through.

Better than that are trial subscriptions. I've had trial subscriptions to The Economist, Newsweek, Time, Maclean's, House & Home (or something like that) and several others I can't recall.

You usually get 2-4 issues, and as long as you send in the bill at the end (they always try to send you a bill, often masked as a "renewal") with a big bar through it saying CANCEL and a nice note thanking them for the trial issues, then you usually won't here from them again.

Best of all, once you get a free trial from one magazine, quite often you'll be offered the chance to trial other magazines, or if you just check the ads out in the magazines you'll find more free trials.

Needless to say, my bathroom reading bin is always well stocked.
posted by furtive at 8:34 AM on March 30, 2005

I can tell you what my experience has been. I regularly check a little bloglike site by the name of The Free Stuff Times, that lists places to get free stuff, real free stuff, not something that requires a credit card or shipping and handling, or whatever. He regularly lists sites that are offering free magazines. At first, I was skeptical about it, but I figured it was worth a shot.

As it turns out, I got a lot of the magazines I signed up for. I've gotten Spin, Stuff, Interview, Hollywood Life, Computer Gaming, Electronic Gaming, MacAddict, Maxim, and a few others. Absolutely free, no nothing extra.

My bit of advice is this: use a PO Box to have the magazines delivered to, so that your home address isn't given out; create a Yahoo or Hotmail email account solely for free magazines, so that your regular inbox isn't overflowing with spam in case they sell your name to other people; use a variation of your real name on the shipping address, perhaps just omitting a letter here and changing a vowel there, so you can recognize anything spurious that comes in; and make up a fake phone number so that you don't get called by telemarketers.

Then, just sit back and enjoy the stack of free magazines you've placed in your bathroom for easy reading. My butt's getting tired from all the time spent devouring my slew of magazines.
posted by NewGear at 8:37 AM on March 30, 2005

Thanks for the helpful comments. Has anyone read through these niche business magazines? Any reviews of how good (or bad) they are?
posted by yevge at 9:07 AM on March 30, 2005

yevge: they editorials are usually worthwhile, the rest of the content is often focused around product placement, which can be good if you're not aware of these things already. I think they are worthwhile because they will cover a broad list of topics and so you can get insight into something you don't necessarily work with.
posted by furtive at 9:17 AM on March 30, 2005

At least in the Safety realm those "free" magazines are better than the membership versions. For example, Occupational Hazards, Risk & Insurance, Environmental Compliance, and Facility Management are much more useful than Professional Safety from the ASSE. The ads are useful and sometimes I find myself using their products in my budget. Furthermore, I read these because you can actually see your well established coworkers published, not just academia.
posted by sled at 9:53 AM on March 30, 2005

I have subscribed in the past to some and I currently subscribe to one now. "Credit Card Management Monthly", (sorry no website I could find...) I read it every month. The only way I'd be able to keep up to date with the card industry. Some suck and go straight to the trash, but those that don't, like this one for me, I really value and am happy I get from free. I don't care about the junk mail, the magazine is worth it.
posted by pwb503 at 11:24 AM on March 30, 2005

A few years ago, I got a good number of the free magazines sent to my business address. While I always got my free magazine, I also got a good amount of junk mail too. I also remember getting calls often to do a phone survey for a few of the magazines on a regular basis.

I would follow some ofthe advice above just to try to at least control the mail and phone calls.
posted by punkrockrat at 3:23 PM on March 30, 2005