[retcore]

From personal memory in publishing in the early nineties, USPO rates publications carrying less than a third of paid advertising pages as first class postage. A impossible cost. This had the useful effect of ensuring that unsold pages went at steep discounts, increasing as your imposition deadline approached. Imposition is the DTP term for layup, the arrangement of pages over a webb offset press to paginate correctly after folding and cutting. With inventory so many options expiring P=1 worthless, I ended up involved in a kind of early computational advertising business. What was very different and impossible to find web publishing equivalent for, was the far better observabity and discovery of the pre long tail in print advertising trading. Lots else looked much like it superficially does today for online.

Incidentally I think that multi month circulation delays were almost always caused by the International Postal Union rules for Direct Injection of bulk mail at wholesale rates. Very small countries you'd need a minimum of 5,000 items per lot. IPU rules effectively created a hysteresis inflection around global readership acquisition and acquisition costs that pumped advertising price cycles.