Ms. Profitable With No Ads, Owner Reports

Ms. magazine is marking its first anniversary without advertising, and its owner says profit is stronger than when the publication chased after paying promoters.

Dale Lang, who bought the struggling magazine in the fall of 1989 and agreed to see whether it could survive on circulation revenue alone, said the results exceeded his expectations.

He declined to disclose how profitable the magazine was in the past year but said that its profit margin was more than double the industry average and that renewal rates for subscriptions are well above the norm.

“It’s been a very interesting experiment,” Lang said in an interview last week. “I expect you will see more ad-free magazines coming along.”

But some industry experts said they doubt that the experience at Ms. will herald a new wave of magazines that try to make it on subscription and newsstand sales as their only sources of revenue.

They say Ms. is different from most magazines because it has an intensely loyal following of readers and staffers who share its commitment to a cause--the women’s movement.

“It’s more than a magazine to a lot of people,” said Martin S. Walker, an industry consultant for Periodical Studies Service Inc.

Ms. was founded in July, 1972, and had a generally uneasy relationship with the advertising community. While it counted on ad revenue, it also campaigned against sexism in advertising and relished pointing out examples of it.

Co-founder Gloria Steinem wrote in the premiere issue of the ad-free Ms. last August that advertisers frequently insist that their ads appear with “complementary copy”--such as a food ad in the recipe section.

But Ms. didn’t supply that kind of environment, she wrote, and as a result “could never attract enough advertising to break even.”