Ryan Dillman

Similar to newspapers, magazines don’t really make their profit from subscription sales. They live or die on their advertising revenue, and to fluff those numbers and increase members of certain key demographics, they often give out free subscriptions to people who work in businesses that their advertisers are trying to reach. For about a decade now, I’ve been receiving dozens of free magazine subscriptions from websites such as Mercury Magazines or Free Biz Mags.

Some of these free magazines are trade publications that would only be of interest to webmasters or IT professionals, but they also offer me a surprising assortment of consumer magazines. Over the years I’ve received free subscriptions to magazines such as Wired, Boating, Maxim, FHM, Stuff, Car & Driver, Horses Illustrated, US News & World Report, and many more. While I hate to endorse reading magazines offline and killing more trees, sometimes it’s just nice to have a physical magazine that you can stuff in your bag and pull out whenever you have a free minute or need to kill some time. They make good bathroom reading as well, and, more importantly, they’re free. I have a hard time saying no to anything that’s free.