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.