Magazine Industry Overview

Magazine Industry Overview 

The magazine industry has been lowly developing since it first started however since the 1950s where sales had peaked. Sales of printed magazines have been slowly falling. From the bullet points below you can see how much money is being lost by some of the major magazine publishers in the UK, over 13 years from 2000.

• IPC Media (Time Inc) – 49% Drop

• Dennis Publishing – 63% Drop

• Hearst Magazine UK – 32% Drop

• Conde Nast Publications Ltd – 9% Drop

• Future Publishing Ltd – 70% Drop

• Bauer Consumer Media – 41% Drop

These are just some of the magazine publisher in the UK together publishing around 8,000 individual magazines which are split into seven categories:

• Consumer

• Business/Trade

• Customer

• Staff

• Newspaper Supplements

• Part Works

• Academic Journals

Many of these have sub categories like the consumer magazine which includes things like women magazines and TV magazines. From the table below you can see that the top 10 magazines in the UK are all women’s magazine and TV listings. 

You can also see the rapid decline in sales this could be suggested by the earlier research into the Billboard magazine that more females are using technology to view the magazines than they are buying the printed copy. Therefore making the industry waste around 1billion pounds on printing costs. This can also be shown with that 1.4 billion of magazines that are now currently sold in the UK with 2.1 billion that were sold in 1970.

Overall there are around 3000 consumer magazine in the UK with 2.5billion pounds spent buy the consumers.

With the development of technology it is shown the many people are turning to the internet for advertising because they are trying to keep up with the latest technology. This means that advertising in the magazine industry has fallen to £397m making it even more difficult for the UK publishers to make money, along with the added battle that the market for UK publisher is much smaller of than that of the US with around 58m possible readers and the US having around 265m.

The other reason why we may see the trend in fallen sales of print magazines is that they too are trying to keep up with other trends like the rise in the use of technology, therefore they are resorting to apps where people can download the issue and read it on their smart phone and tablet.

The consumer magazines are the leading sector in the UK magazine industry and is said to be the worlds most sophisticated and competitive industry in the world, with 2 times more titles than France and according to WH Smiths around 421 – 602 new magazine launched annually. This sector also includes the music area of the industry, which is said to be the leading music magazines for the pop music genre as well as covering a lot of other genres and many detailed analysis of the UK`s music industry as well as international music. These are:

1. Q

2. Rolling Stone

3. Entertainment Weekly

4. Billboard

5. Blender

6. Alternative Press

7. Paste

8. Vibe

9. NME

10. Spin

This part of the industry is also seeing a downfall in sales of printed copies:

• Q: 58,980, down 8.7 %

• Kerrang: 37,603, down 6.5 %

• New Musical Express: 20,011, down 16.4 %

(Figures from 2013)

This trend will continue to fall especially with the introduction of more and more technology with the younger generation and some of the older generation, as it is more accessible and easier to get hold of an issue.

In 2015 there are around 151m retail copies sold, 210 new magazine launches and £282m Retail Sales, within the whole UK magazine industry.