Overview of the Magazine Industry

A brief look into the overall Magazine Industry and I found that there are more than 8000 magazines published in Britain. These 8000 titles can be broken down into categorises, one would be ‘consumer’ titles, both general and specialist, which would be normally sold in newsagents and most of the time are available online. Another category would be ‘business’, which includes trade, professional and people at work. ‘Customer Magazines’ that organisations give to their customs as a form of marketing. Staff magazines are given to employees to inform the staff about their company. Magazines that you receive free as part of a daily or Sunday Paper, is another category called ‘Newspaper Supplements’. Another two parts of the magazine industry are ‘Part works’, a set number of issues builds up an ‘encyclopaedia’ on a specific topic, and ‘Academic Journals’, which are for university-level discussion of all sort s of arcane topics. However, out of all these sub-sections of the magazine industry the Consumer magazine makes up the bulk of the titles for sale in the newsagents. These vary to general titles such as ‘Elle’, ‘Loaded’ and ‘Radio Times’ which are entertainment and aim to inform, or they can be consumer specialist titles which are more specific and aim at particular interests, magazines such as ‘Car’, ‘Gardeners’ and ‘Total Film’.

By 2008 sales revenue in newsagents the biggest consumer magazine publishes were Bauer Publishing with 25%, closely followed by IPC Media with 20%, then BBC with 7.8% (Immediate Media brought out BBC magazines in October in 2011) and National magazine company are at 7.3%.

Today in the United Kingdom there are over 3,200 different consumer titles which is a dramatic contrast to 1980 where there only were 1,383, so we can clearly see that the amount of choice of magazine you can have has increased. 1.4 billion magazines are sold each year, and 85% of the UK’s population reads a magazine. In 2008 Advertises spent £745,000,000 on magazine! And, consumers spent £2 billion on magazines yearly! However, in the current market only 3 out of 10 titles survive for more than 4 years!

But magazines that are huge and are the top 5 women’s monthly magazine of 2013 are Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Yours, Women & Home and Good Housekeeping. And the top four for Men’s lifestyle were Men’s Health, Nuts, FHM and GQ.