TV Guide: The Economic Importance of Having One

For many years, especially with the rise and evolution of television, TV guides have been all around us, first as magazines, then digitally on our devices to help us know when our favorite shows come… but have you ever taken a moment to stop and wonder if they impact our lives beyond letting us know what shows are coming when? The answer is yes! In addition to all this, they do have an economic impact and we are here to delve into the economic importance of having a TV guide in our lives. So, let’s hop on and see what that’s about!

TV Guide: The Most Prominent of Them All

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For many decades, TV Guide has been a must-have on top of television sets in millions of living rooms across America. The publishing tycoon Walter Annenberg founded the magazine in 1953 and since then, it has grown to become the consistently highest-selling magazine in the country. At its height, the magazine sold over 20 million copies a week, offering a variety of feature articles and listings in over 200 editions, each with complete listings for a particular local market.

How the Market Operates

The fact that the media industry and its derivatives, such as TV guides, are somewhat distinct from the others is very well-known since they typically operate as a dual-product marketplace. This means that media firms often market content to audiences and other products, such as audience attention, to advertisers. The fact that these two product markets are interrelated should be quite obvious because the audiences are essentially the product in the other product market.

With the rise of many TV shows and movies that are hard to keep track of, TV guides are a decent way to know what’s new and upcoming. Having to pay a subscription for them, a down-pour of money occurs in the American economy through taxes taken from the large corporations providing them, which, in turn, makes them of tremendous economic importance.

So, What’s the Problem Now?

TV Guide shifted from being just about shows’ listings to diving further into myriad aspects of entertainment, as new technologies and varying viewing habits have made tracking listings up more difficult and impractical. Since its audience’s erosion commenced with cable and satellite television systems growth, which offer their proper on-screen programming guides, therefore in 2005, TV Guide shifted from being your conventional magazine, dropped many of its listings, and added color to its listing pages, forcing it to add more pages each year.

Furthermore, readers per copy of Total TV Guide magazine in the United Kingdom have dropped drastically from 2006 to 2016, as with the rise of platforms like Netflix and Disney+, people can stream what they want, whenever they want without needing a guide to when to see a certain show, which decreased the demand for them. Additionally, there are too many channels to list, and to keep track of each of them would be time-consuming which makes it impractical for readers.

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