I've been out of the print magazine biz for a long time, and was only an editorial content supplier at best, but the figures SkyMall was charging for quarter-pa

I've been out of the print magazine biz for a long time, and was only an editorial content supplier at best, but the figures SkyMall was charging for quarter-page or full-page ads in their magazine were eye-watering. For a top 5 newsstand computer magazine in the US I'd have expected $10-15K/page; SkyMall were pushing an order of magnitude above that, presumably because of the size of the market but also the captive nature of the audience. A secondary issue: most people don't look at the ads in magazines for entertainment unless there's no other entertainment option available. SkyMall had the privileged position of being the only eyeball candy to hand for millions of flyers who weren't allowed to use their laptops or tablets or phones at certain times, and who hadn't thought to buy an emergency magazine or paper book. (Full disclosure: I'm often one of them.) I suspect games or ebooks or emagazines will prove vastly more attractive than a SkyMall catalog, so what's going to drop is the number of eyeballs on pages, which will eventually bite into the first-time-buyer stats for the advertisers, with indirect knock-on effects on the SkyMall business as a whole. The advertiser-relationship side of the business is indeed likely to stay viable, and Xhibit has bought a buttload of goodwill business, but the magazine is almost certainly going to become non-viable as soon as iPads are legal during take-off and landing and especially if a price war breaks out between airlines over in-flight wifi.