Everyone has a stack of old magazines lying around the house somewhere, and whether you’re walking by a newsstand at the mall or sitting in the dentist’s office, you’ll be tempted to pick up a magazine and turn the pages. Magazines are everywhere, but what exactly are they?

On the one hand, journals are a mechanism for providing people with current information on a wide range of topics on a regular basis—usually monthly, but in some cases even weekly.

However, the word magazine was originally used to refer to a store of grain or gunpowder, so how did the term come to be associated with a periodical publication?

Edward Cave started the first periodical to use the word magazine in its title in London in 1731. Cave used the word magazine in the name ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ to imply that this new publication was a storehouse of information, providing all the news a civilized person would need in order to keep abreast of the latest happenings in the world. Cave magazine was a huge success, and within a few years several spin-off publications began appearing in London and the United States.

Magazines have gone through a complex evolution over the years, and it helps to think of magazines as belonging to one of three distinct categories: trade, news, and consumer.

Trade magazines are designed to inform members of a particular professional or professional group about items of particular interest to them. Individuals and companies buy subscriptions to trade magazines, and most of the content is written by and for people in the trade – for example, accountants or school teachers. These magazines are generally not available to the general public, and any advertisements they may contain (usually not very much) tend to be directed at members of that trade.

News magazines, often published weekly in the case of publications such as “Time” or “The Economist,” are aimed at a wide readership. These magazines are designed to provide a single source from which readers can keep up with news, current events, and hot topics. It is available in bookstores and newsstands, as well as by subscription, and the moderate amount of advertising it contains is quite varied in respect of the products offered, and very general in the approach to advertising.

The vast majority of modern magazines fall into the consumer category, and these magazines are aimed at very specific segments of the population, whether they are dog lovers, gardeners, brides, or just people who want to get rich. Consumer magazines usually contain a number of small articles dealing with topics of interest to the target group, but in most cases the bulk of the available space is devoted to advertising.

In consumer magazines, advertisers have the opportunity to display a well-defined mix of products, in a way that speaks directly to the target group. For the marketer, this means that they get maximum penetration with their message, and for the publishers, it means that they can rely on advertisers to generate the bulk of their revenue stream. With consumer magazines, actual magazine sales are a secondary consideration. What matters is that potential advertisers believe that through magazines, information about their products becomes more accessible to people who are more likely to buy what they sell.

Every time you choose a magazine that catches your interest, even if you just browse through it for a little while, you are one step closer to buying something, and if magazines do what they are designed to do, then the thing will not be the magazine.