Like the newspaper, a magazine is one of the major media and advocacy, influence on public opinion, shaping it in accordance with the interests of certain ideological groups, social classes, political parties and organizations. With the advent of desktop publishing technology and the proliferation of commercial printers with the ability to color printing in Russia in the late XX - early XXI century, magazines have become the main advertising medium for products of premium "and" Luxury ". As a rule, addressed to a strictly defined group of readers and are either the world and nation-wide magazines, catalogs, or advertising.

With the advent of the Internet, magazines began to appear in the network. First on the sites began to lay out the archives of publications, and later began to appear online journals. They did not come out in print, but existed solely on the vast World Wide Web. Now, some of them have an audience several times larger than similar publications.