Feature: Home Computing Magazine Market Goes From Strength To Strength

A few years ago, the poaching of a computer magazine’s deputy editor by a rival publishing company was unlikely to make the front pages of the media trade press. When Dylan Armbrust, who held just that position at VNU’s fortnightly Computeractive left to join Future Publishing last month, Media Week were interested enough to give the story pole position. Speculation had it that Armbrust is to spearhead the launch of a rival title to VNU’s, which achieves a circulation of 325,000, despite being less than three years old.

The latest figures from MMXI Europe put the number of people with internet access in the UK at 10 million. Meanwhile new research from the ITC has found that 31% of all television viewers have a personal computer in their homes. No longer just for geeks, this is an area of interest which has blossomed almost from nowhere during the last decade, creating a rich new seam of readers for home computer and internet magazines.

Discounting gaming magazines, ten years ago this market was served by just one title, What PC. Today, the figure stands at more than twenty, and the figure continues to grow.

At the same time ABC circulations across the sector have risen from 23,000 in 1990, to 393,000 in 1995 up to 839,000 in the latest set of figures. It is noticeable that while most other magazine publishers saw a drop in ABC figures in the last auditing period, two exceptions were Future Publishing, which counts titles such as PC Answers and Internet Advisor amongst its computing-weighted stable and put on 10.2% overall, and Dennis, which publishes PC Zone and gained 12.2%.

Home computer and internet titles also represent a departure for an industry whose flagships are aimed at women. Readers of PC Answers et al are predominantly male, aged 18-35 and ABC1, representing an as-yet elusive mass market for advertisers which the ‘lad’s mag’ has only gone some way to tapping. With the market for both men’s and women’s lifestyle titles seemingly stalled at the moment – women’s monthly titles dropped 4% as a sector for the last auditing period and men’s titles only managed a 3.8% increase thanks largely to the launch of Later – it appears that the geeks may yet have their day.