Everyone has a heap of old magazines lying at home somewhere, and whether you're walking past a newsstand in the mall or sitting in the dentist's office, you're going to be tempted to grab a magazine and flip through the pages. Magazines are everywhere, but what're they exactly?

On one hand, magazines really are a mechanism for providing people who have current informative data on a broad array of topics on a regular basis - usually monthly, but sometimes even weekly.

However, the word magazine was originally used to point a storehouse for grain or gunpowder, just how did the term come to be of a periodical publication?

The first periodical to use the word magazine in its title was were only available in London by Edward Cave in 1731 F95Zone. Cave used the word magazine in the name of his 'Gentleman's Magazine' to suggest that new publication was a storehouse of information, providing all the news a civilized person needed to be able to keep updated on the thing that was going on in the world. Cave's magazine was tremendously successful, and within a few years several spin-off publications began to seem in London and in the United States.

Magazines have gone by way of a complex evolution through the years, and it's instructive to think about magazines as belonging to at least one of three distinct categories: trade, news, and consumer.

Trade magazines are created to inform the members of a certain professional or occupational group, of items of specific interest to them. Individuals and businesses purchase subscriptions to trade magazines, and the majority of the content is written by and for people in the trade - for instance, accountants or school teachers. These magazines are usually not available to everyone, and any advertising that they may contain (usually not much) is often fond of members of the trade.

News magazines, which in case of publications like 'Time' or 'The Economist' in many cases are published weekly, are fond of a broad readership. These magazines are created to provide a single source through which readers can catch up on news, current events, and hot topics. They can be found in bookstores, at newsstands, along with by subscription, and the moderate quantity of advertising which they contain is fairly varied with respect to products displayed, and quite general when it comes to the approach taken in the ads.

The vast majority of modern magazines fall into the consumer category, and these magazines are fond of highly specific segments of the populace, whether dog-lovers, gardeners, brides-to-be, or people who wish to get rich. Consumer magazines usually contain numerous small articles that handle topics of interest to the targeted group, but in most instances the majority of available space is specialized in advertising.

In consumer magazines, advertisers get the chance to pitch well-defined mixes of products, in a way that speaks right to the targeted group. For the marketer, this implies they are getting maximum penetration using their message, and for publishers this implies that they'll depend on the advertisers to generate the majority of their revenue stream. With consumer magazines, actual sales of the magazine really are a secondary consideration. What matters is that potential advertisers believe, through magazines, information regarding their products is getting straight into the hands of those individuals who are usually to purchase what they're selling.

Each time you select up a magazine that catches your interest, even when and then flick through it briefly, you're one step closer to purchasing something, and if magazines are doing what they're designed to accomplish this something is not going to function as the magazine.