I hear a lot of comments about the size of the Society's printing empire. Some persons have suggested that it is one of the largest in the world. I would like to dispute that statement.
The Society prints about 25 million copies of each mag, 48 issues per year. That means that they print about 38.4 billion pages of WT's and Awakes. If you add in books, brochures, KMs, etc, you probably end up around 50 - 60 billion pages. That seems like a lot, but is it?
Consider the following:
USA Today: (2.3 Million circulation) x (64 page avg size) x (305 issues) = 44.9 billion pages Then consider that newspaper pages are about 3 times the size of WT pages, and it turns out that this one newspaper prints the equivalent of 135 Billion WT pages per year. It alone is more than double the size of the Society's printing empire.
Reader's Digest: Approximately 65 Billion pages in the magazine only. This does not include all of their other publications. By the way, RD estimates that each issue of their mag is read by 11 people. Contrast that with the WT (3/4 probably don't even get opened).
Southam News: Owns 57 dailies, and 150 weekly papers in Canada. By world standards it is a moderate sized newspaper empire. They print approx 200 Billion WT equivalent pages.
Quebecor: The largest printing company in the world. I don't know how much they print, but they host over 1 Billion UNIQUE web pages, and that isn't even their core business.
I live in a relatively small city, but even my little daily paper prints 8.8 Billion WT equivalent pages per year. In fact, this is such a small quantity, that the printing is not done locally. It is merged with other papers in larger cities, and shipped here.
So, by the standards of my desktop printer, they are pretty big. But, by the standards of world class printing companies, they really don't even rate. I suspect they look big, only because they are so inefficient.