14 January 2008

Chess Life Advertising

Someone recently made a comment to me exposing the fact that I rarely look at the ads in Chess Life. That's not good, because it's a reasonable way to keep up with the commercial side of chess in the U.S. Since December is a big month for retailers, I decided to investigate all of the ads carried in the December CL. I excluded the classified ads because I had looked at those in a 2006 post titled June Chess Life.

The USCF ad rates are online -- see USchess.org's Advertising -- with rates for both the magazine and the web site. The page starts, 'Membership and Demographics : The US Chess Federation has 85,000 members, of whom 35,000 are adults and 50,000 are youth or scholastic members. The population is predominantly male. Adult members are generally college-educated and affluent.'

The best locations in the magazine were occupied by heavyweights in the business side of chess:-

The rest of the mag carried the following advertising, not counting tournament ads or USCF ads for member services:-

It's not too surprising that all but one ad had an associated URL.

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