In October 1995, Suck.com published a story by editor Joey Anuff (aka The Duke of URL) on How To Read Wired. In short, his advice was to take a hearty dollop of irony and then rip out all the back-to-back ads.

Twelve years ago, according to Suck, Wired 3.09 contained 206 pages, of which 90 were full-page ads. If you included the partial-page ads, the ad/content split was an even 50/50.

I decided to revisit Suck’s how-to with Wired’s December 2007 issue (15.12). It had 290 pages, of which 151 were full-page ads. Today, if you include the partial-page ads, the ad/content split is about 53/47.

If anything has changed, it’s the amount of product-driven content. This issue contained 18 pages in the front of the book that were devoted entirely to products (What’s Inside Lotrimin Ultra? Play Super Mario! Wow, Expensive Motorcycle!). Then there’s the Wish List, “a survey of the stuff we’re dying to get (and give) this holiday season,” which includes a Top Ten that lasts for 12 pages, plus 24 pages of some of the most blatant product placement I’ve ever seen in a magazine. Check out this spread and tell me if it’s an ad or not.

If you include all this product placement with the ads (where it belongs), it totals 198.5 pages, which is 68% of the magazine, leaving 91.5 pages of actual content. Sad.

Suck’s instructions still work like a charm. Wired is printed with perfect binding, and pages come out like butter. I removed any page that had ads on both sides. If Wired has changed at all, it’s that they’ve gotten better at avoiding this situation. Of the 151 full-page ads, only 88 were doubled-up, allowing me to tear out 44 pages. Still, what a difference.

Inset photo courtesy of Suck.com.

I’ll say this for Wired: As much as they’ve let rampant consumerism take over the book, they still treat their Features section as sacrosanct. There’s nary an ad to be seen from Noah Sachtman’s “What Went Wrong” on how techo-optimism led us astray in Iraq (an amazing story, a shame it had such an ugly corner-to-corner design) to the end of Carlyle Adler’s “The Secrets of Silicon Valley” on thefunded.com’s pole vault over the walls of Sand Hill Road (with a beautiful angular text design and b&w photos by Rainer Hosch).

Wired, like the internet itself, has grown up a lot over the last 12 years, sometimes with the grace of the adolescent it was. But in web years, it’s about 150-years-old now, and far be it from us not to show our elders the respect they’ve earned.

Here’s to ya’, old man.

The writing is on the wall for print advertising. Print media buys go down every year, while online ad buys double. That’s why it’s surprising that “don’t call it a phone” handset manufacturer and phone network Helio has decided to launch its own magazine. Even more surprising is that it’s pretty good.

Helio Magazine is 6×9, about 56 pages, and beautifully printed on matte paper. It focuses on entertainment, art, music, and movies, with a decidedly hipster vibe. Many projects like this would feel inauthentic – middle aged ad execs trying to talk like tweeners. But Helio’s triumph is that they pull it off. Credit probably goes to the magazine’s LA-based publisher, StreetVirus.

The magazine is distributed free, and you can’t subscribe, so you just have to luck into it. I recently found issue 6 (Fall 2007) in a local cafe in San Francisco. The cover by artist Mark Ryden immediately grabbed me, and the interview with him was a highlight of the issue for me.

But it’s hard to think about Helio Magazine without thinking about advertising. This issue has no advertisements (past issues have, which felt weird). Indeed, the whole magazine is an advertisement for Helio. But it’s subtle. The articles don’t ever mention Helio directly – a good thing, too, because I’d have thrown the thing away the moment they asked Ryden, “So, what do you love about your Helio?”

The issue is peppered with art – some really incredible, some just meh – by Otis School of Design students in what the magazine describes as an “art/ad collaboration.” It is only in these pieces that the Helio logo even appears. A pessimist would call this sneaky, but I found it playful. Most brands would not allow their logo to appear in the eye holes of a skull, or as a set of pasties on a fluorescent nude.

Low points in this issue: a story on Katamari Damacy which is about three years past its prime; a story on emoticons that reads like a high school final (the lede: “The 21st Century has been marked, perhaps most resonantly, by the incestuous intertwining of social communi….” Zzzzz.); and a photo essay that screams out “what were they thinking?” even in the bizarre world of fashion.

Even with its flaws, Helio Magazine is an interesting experiment. It shows what can happen when a company loves its audience more than its logo. If nothing else, it’s a beautiful page-flipper, and worth exactly as much as you paid for it.

Further Reading: Check out more photos of Helio Magazine Issue 6 or download PDFs of issues 4 and 5.