Wired may yet be the first “crossover” pub­li­ca­tion.  While dig­i­tal ads rep­re­sent­ed over 45% of its ad rev­enue, Wired’s print cir­cu­la­tion of 800,000 is still quite strong. It’s been report­ed that half of its total ad rev­enue in the last quar­ter of 2012 came from digital.

Dig­i­tal ads account­ed for just under half (45 per­cent) of total ad rev­enue at Wired for the year as a whole. But The Atlantic trumped even Wired’s dig­i­tal high­point, with dig­i­tal ad rev­enue account­ing for 59 per­cent of the title’s total for 2012. With big brands retain­ing their reliance on the tricky busi­ness of print and with its dwin­dling read­er­ship, this is encour­ag­ing news indeed.

The qui­et rise of dig­i­tal advertising

The rea­son why Wired makes the head­line here rather than The Atlantic, though, boils down to one big fact. Data from the Media Indus­try Newslet­ter shows clear­ly that the former’s print busi­ness is much, much big­ger. Adver­tis­ers can rest assured that with Wired they’ll have a ver­i­fied, paid cir­cu­la­tion of 800,000, with 885 ad pages run in 2012. Equiv­a­lent fig­ures for The Atlantic are 450,000 and 463 ad pages.

It’s fair to note that rev­enues from dig­i­tal ads in most mag­a­zines still lag well below these lev­els. But when you con­sid­er that dig­i­tal con­tributed a hum­ble 10 per­cent of total ad rev­enue at Wired in 2006, a five hun­dred per­cent increase in six years is a pret­ty spec­tac­u­lar trend by anyone’s standards.

A silent revolution?

Howard Mittman, Wired’s VP-pub­lish­er, said, “We spent a lot of time debat­ing whether we were the best mag­a­zine with a web­site or the best web­site with a mag­a­zine. And at the end of the day, I don’t think we care. Hit­ting 50% is proof that there is a suc­cess­ful tem­plate inside of this indus­try that can be fol­lowed by oth­ers and that hav­ing a mag­a­zine does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly need to be an ana­log anchor around your tech­no­log­i­cal neck.”

The title’s web­site remains a cru­cial dri­ver of the total, account­ing for 90 per­cent of its dig­i­tal ad rev­enue. Even so, this could well be set to change in favor of mobile gad­gets. While the bulk of rev­enue is com­ing from tra­di­tion­al desk­top devices, the rise of the smart­phones and tablets is almost cer­tain to chal­lenge this ascen­dant posi­tion in the very near future.