Oof. This Sky magazines news is a blow. Its customer magazines have been a fixture at the top of the ABC's list of the UK's biggest circulating titles for years now.

There have been hints that Sky was looking to change its marketing mix in this regard, just over a year ago it was tinkering with the frequencies and formats of its titles.

This week's actions, though, mark a radical change of customer communication strategy. By canning its Sky Sports and Sky Movies titles, and cutting back Sky magazine to just four issues a year rather than 12, the broadcaster is culling more than 105.5m magazines per annum. I've no idea how big this pile of magazines would be in terms of the height of double-decker buses, Nelson's column, or how far they would stretch around the earth. What I do know is that it is A LOT.

This will be quite a saving on print, paper and mailing costs for Sky - especially in the light of rising prices for the latter two of those items, at least. I'm not viewing this as some sort of wider death-knell for customer magazines in general, though. Sky has spent millions and millions of pounds on marketing to attract ten million subscribers to its services, now it wants to make maximum margin out of all those punters. A weekly email will be relatively cheap, and it will allow customers to do clever stuff like automatically record programmes by clicking a link. If that is, they a) receive the email and b) open it.

What's also notable from the ABC's list is that just shy of 3.6m copies of the three leading TV listings mags are actually purchased every week.