Why are magazine subscriptions so cheap? It all ties back to their main source of revenue, advertising money, and one of the most important metrics used to sell...View More advertisers is the quantity of readers & subscribers the magazine has. The bigger the reach, the more valuable the advertising is. You can save so much money as a subscriber because you're counted as a guaranteed reader each month of the year whereas a single magazine buyer is not. The difference in price is made to sway one-time readers to full-time readers and have them exposed to the advertising continuously. With that said, the pop-up examples below show how Women's Health are trying to get subscribers simply by filling out a pop-up form with their name and address. From there, they will be sent the yearly subscription bill, which is only $9.90 for 10 issues. By not getting paid upfront, they're creating a lower resistance, one-step first commitment that likely creates a lot more subscribers, even though the billing is delayed & less direct.