Oh, and at the risk of adding even more - this is all for the UK market. The US market is completely different: there, the cost of launching a national magazine is so high that there's much less competition, and much less competition means more stilted, boring magazines. We're lucky we live in such a small (geographically) country.
On 15/06/07, Ian Betteridge <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 15/06/07, Dave Crossland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Can you provide a reference for this claim? :-) Yep - http://www.ppamarketing.net/cgi-bin/wms.pl/60, plus http://www.ppamarketing.net/cgi-bin/wms.pl/899 if you want more detail. I haven't got detailed figures on how the different sectors break down, but basically consumer magazines keep going up and up, while business-to-business titles are generally static (and in some sectors, like technology, falling). Consumer mags have had ten years of solid growth. And, of course, that's not accounting for contract magazine publishing, which is growing massively - think Waitrose Food Illustrated and its ilk. The big growth is in glossy weeklies, at the moment - Grazia (which sells to more ABC1's than any other title on the market - Vogue has nothing on the spending power of the Grazia reader) and the like. I was at http://stbride.org/events_education/events/newspaperdesign > and heard that the _only_ newspaper that is profitable today, apart > from the zero-price 100%-ads papers that have sprung up like mushrooms > lately, is the Daily Mail. I figured magazines would be the same, and > am genuinely curious to hear differently :-) Ahh, well "profitable" is a different matter. Magazines depends far more on ad revenue than sales - titles with relatively small circulations can be hugely profitable (Felix Dennis refers to his mansion as "the house that MacUser built" for this very reason). But having said that, ad spend in magazines keep going up overall - 25% in real terms over the past ten years, or thereabouts. But the point I was making was really about demand for magazines, which has never been higher. We're paying more for them than ever, while buying more than ever. So it seems that, while we like our news stories on screen, we like our features on paper. Nice, thick, glossy paper with big pictures :)
