Is it weird if you save a lot of money on a magazine subscription?

Magazine subscriptions are typically very inexpensive. Do you mean it was cheap for a subscription, or cheap compared to the newstand price? Magazines sell their advertising space based on how many people are reading the magazine, so if they can tell a business we have X number of subscribers they make a lot of revenue on the sale of the advertising space.

Heavy discounts are common, not weird at all.

It’s normal to pay only a fraction of the cost of the cover price when getting a subscription (when you break it down per issue). The idea is that the magazine companies have a nice income via subscriptions, and their extra copies go to stores and news stands, where they can jack up the price and rake in even more money. So, you might spend $5 on a magazine at the store, but only pay $2 per issue with a subscription.

Magazines make the bulk of their income from selling ads (although that’s getting harder and harder); it’s to their advantage to be able to tout to advertisers the size of their readership and therefore good business for them to offer subscription discounts.

I think they just want readers, and the more they have, the more they can get for advertising. So they give very, very cheap subscriptions, and then raise ad revenue.

Good job, you have learned to take advantage of their policy to get new readers. Watch out for the subscription renewals though, they might just surprise you.

@Cdog95 A 12-month subscription guarantees 12 copies of the magazine get sold. The same copies on the newsstand may end up being returned. Put another way: a subscription represents a “bird” in the hand, whereas individual copies on the newsstand represent “birds” in the bush.