alive had a big year in 2007.

Though it’s been around for 34 years, Teldon Publishing Inc.’s alive Magazine isn’t quite a lunchroom name in the Canadian magazine industry. It may surprise some of you, then, to learn that the Vancouver-based health and wellness magazine earned more than $7 million in revenue last year.

It certainly surprised us—we didn’t call the publishers when we were compiling our annual Top 50 list for 2007, thereby excluding it from the rankings. A note from marketing manager Kiran Gill Judge, however, informed us that the magazine had earnings of $7,237,384 in 2007 ($5,457,191 from ads, according to the publishers, and $1,780,193 from subscriptions), meaning alive should have filled spot 31 on our list, just below Report on Business and ahead of several national titles, including Canadian Gardening, Financial Post Business and Wish.

Those figures also represent an impressive 25.7%  improvement over 2006, when, according to Judge, the magazine earned $5,753,867 in revenue.

alive has undergone several important changes recently, including a switch to perfect binding beginning with its October 2007 issue (the magazine’s 300th issue) and membership in the Print Measurement Bureau (readership: 562,000). Still, Judge says getting word out remains a challenge. “So many in our industry have dismissed alive magazine in the past that they are having a difficult time processing the high calibre of magazine that we are today,” she wrote in her e-mail.

Related links

• Masthead ranks Canada's Top 50 money-making magazines [MastheadOnline]