“Life’s Circulation: Circumventing the ABC with ‘Pass-Along’ Stats”
by Erika Doss
Launched on November 23, 1936 and published as a weekly until December 29, 1972, Life was perhaps the most popular magazine of the mid-twentieth century, especially among its targeted middle-class audience. Founder Henry Luce conceived Life as an ambitious and even messianic news magazine aimed at shaping citizenship, defining class, and regulating national identity among readers. He believed these objectives were best and most powerfully met with pictures that he and other magazine staffers deemed especially compelling for their imagined course of American culture, politics, and society. Life was, first and foremost, a picture magazine: an average issue in the 1950s included 150 photographs and as many (or more) advertising images.[i]
Readers and advertisers avidly responded to the magazine’s instrumental use of pictures. ABC Reports for November 22, 1937, for example, show a circulation of 1,575,501 copies. This was impressive considering Life’s disastrous start: a first-run of 466,000 copies, each priced at a dime, vastly outstripped advertising rates (which had been set at a guaranteed weekly circulation of 250,000) and nearly scuttled the entire undertaking: the magazine lost more than five million dollars in its first year.[ii] Business profit was, of course, central to Luce’s mass media enterprises and Time (started in 1923), Fortune (1930), and Sports Illustrated (1954) were each lucrative. Once ad rates were re-calculated to reflect demand, Life too became a mass media moneymaker with considerable reach and influence. Well into the 1960s, Time Inc. (as Luce’s media empire was called) was one of the world’s largest news organizations, with a global array of bureaus, reporters, and photographers producing stories and pictures seen by millions.[iii] For at least three decades, Life made Time Inc. money. In 1935, before Life was launched, the company employed 417 people and reported a gross income of $8.6 million. By the close of 1937—with the nation still in the throes of the Great Depression—Time Inc. had grown to a staff of 888, and had a gross income of $20.9 million.[iv] By the mid-1950s, Life’s staff alone included 35 photographers, 43 editors and writers, and 70 reporters.
Life circulation, 1934-1945
Augmenting Life’s substantial, and profitable, reach was the job of its Promotion Department, which numbered some 79 employees by 1949. Charged with planning and managing campaigns to sell the magazine, to sell ads in the magazine, and to develop products related to the magazine (such as books and records), Life’s “promoters” were deeply attuned to circulation. Following the conventional rubric that circulation numbers determined advertising rates, with a larger readership promising more product visibility, they focused on quantifying the magazine’s base. Like other magazines, Life provided issue-by-issue circulation figures and newsstand and subscription sales numbers every six months to the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), an independent agency formed in 1914 to verify print media circulation claims, and to provide advertisers with some degree of accountability regarding their promotional investments.[v]
Life’s early circulation figures were excellent: in 1940, ABC Reports showed a paid circulation of 2.9 million. But they were not as high as competitors such as The Saturday Evening Post (3.2 million).[vi] Dodging audited circulation numbers, Life organized its own audience measurement studies and invented the “pass-along” rate—the number of people who saw a single issue of the magazine, “regardless of how they obtained it.”[vii] Pass-along spaces included private homes and public “out-of-home” locations like barber shops, beauty salons, doctor’s offices, waiting rooms, and airplanes. As an American Airlines hostess told a Life staffer on board a flight in 1940, “the copy of Life I bought when we left New York has already been asked for by six people on this plane.”[viii] Claiming in the late 1930s that each copy of Life reached 8.9 readers “as against 6.2 for Colliers, and even fewer for the Post [4.2] and Liberty [5.6],” the magazine commanded and received higher rates of advertising.[ix] By 1941, Life took in more advertising dollars than any other magazine in the country. Circumventing the ABC with its own circulation statistics, the weekly Life persisted for 36 years.
Erika Doss is a professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her email is: doss.2@nd.edu. This essay is an excerpt from Erika Doss, “Life’s Impact: Circulation, Copycats, and Reader Response,” in Katherine A. Bussard and Kristen Gresh, eds., Life Magazine and the Power of Photography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020).
[i] Originally founded in 1883 as a humor magazine, Henry Luce bought Life in 1936, acquiring rights to its name and changing it to a weekly news magazine focused on pictures, especially photographs. Life’s 144-page February 21, 1955 issue, for example, included 156 photographs, 10 drawings and illustrations, and over 240 advertising images (with some ads featuring a single image, either a photograph or an illustration, and others featuring multiple images on a single or double-page spread representing different products, views, logos, etc.). ABC Reports for that week show a circulation of 5,616,929.
[ii] Loudon Wainwright, The Great American Magazine: An Inside History of Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 41-42.
[iii] James L. Baughman, Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News Media (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), 198-200.
[iv] D. W. Brumbaugh memo to Time Inc. staff, “RE: Legal Expenses,” August 15, 1938, in Time Inc. Reference Files, MS 3009-RG 3, Box 515, Folder 1, The New-York Historical Society (hereafter, NYHS).
[v] For an overview of the ABC see Charles O. Bennett, Integrity in a Changing World: 75 Years of Industry Self-Regulation Through the Audit Bureau of Circulations (New York: Audit Bureau of Circulations, 1989).
[vi] Brooks Hefner and Edward Timke, Circulating American Magazines: Historical Data from the Audit Bureau of Circulations (2019), http://sites.jmu.edu/circulating/, accessed January 19, 2020.
[vii] Peter Aptakin, “Highlights of the History of Life Audience Research,” April 24, 1963, 1. This in-house report explains that Life conducted nine annual “Continuing Study of Magazine Audiences” (CSMA) surveys from July 1938 to 1948. In 1949, research analyst Alfred Politz was hired to continue the “total audience” studies that Life pioneered. Time Inc. Reference Files, MS 3009-RG 3, Box 515, Folder 13, NYHS. See also James L. Baughman, “Who Read Life? The Circulation of America’s Favorite Magazine,” in Erika Doss, ed., Looking at Life Magazine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 41-51.
[viii] “Life in the Air,”Life Office Newsletter, vol. 1, no. 7, July 19, 1940, Time Inc. Reference Files, MS 3009-RG 3, Box 517, Folder 2, NYHS.
[ix] Aptakin, “Highlights,” 1.