Insight Analysis: Has The Consumer Magazine Industry Reached Saturation Point?

It’s not just the two lifestyle sectors that are enduring a rough patch: the home interest, teen and music markets also saw a year on year decline in sales. In fact, whilst some of the falls were not that large, each of the major markets showed overall decline in the last ABC figures. The bars on the chart here are set to grow come the next ABCs, after the flurry of causalities that has taken place in recent months.

In the men’s market, IPC’s Later closed a couple of weeks ago at the same time as EMAP’s Sky. Later aimed at the more mature man who may have grown out of lads’ mags. Cabal Communications’ Mondo targeted the same group – it disappeared in May. The older man has proven elusive – some say that it is too disparate a group and that a single lifestyle mag will never cut it; some say that the products released so far have just not pulled it off.

Meanwhile, over at the women’s monthlies, a similar movement is taking place. Just as girls move from Mizz and Bliss to Marie Claire and Elle, they sooner or later grow out of these titles too (so the theory goes). Enter the likes of Aura, Eve and Red. Aura has since gone under, whilst BBC Worldwide’s Eve was put on the danger list in a recent poll by the Guardian; Red’s future was considered borderline in the same survey. IPC’s fashion and style title Nova lasted less than a year and no-one was sufficiently interested in John Brown’s upmarket health and fashion offering, Bare, to save it from extinction last week.

It’s not all bad news though. Ad revenues at IPC recently beat all expectations and the stalwarts of the consumer mag world are solidly holding their ground, even if the newcomers are failing. FHM, one of the original male lifestyle titles, put on 14,000 sales last time; Cosmo and Elle are holding strong and all things celebrity-laden are doing well too.

Perhaps there are new markets to be broken in the lifestyle sectors and we just await a creative spark to spot them. Or maybe the men’s and women’s markets are now simply full and publishers will continue to battle over the same piece of turf. Unfortunately, when new launches attempt and fail to squeeze in the year on year graphs tend to look a bit gloomy.