Feature: Pleasing The Teens
The teenage magazine market is known for being as unpredictably moody as its target readers and the latest ABC figures show that at the moment its audience is shrinking.
Unfortunately publishers cannot simply wait for their readers to grow up. The Office of National Statistics figures for 1999/2000 showed that 7-15 year olds spend an average £10.70 per week on items including food, drink, leisure goods, clothing and footwear. Add to this what is bought for them by parents under the influence of ‘pester power’ and it is clear that this is an important, if challenging, market for advertisers.
Just a few years ago, the teenage magazines were showing signs of healthy growth. In the July-December 1997 audit the teenage music/fashion sector, including titles such as Smash Hits and J-17, reached a total circulation in excess of 2.85m, up 11.2% year on year. This began to slip in the coming years, but teens were still being reeled in by Computer Gaming titles, which saw a boom period in the late ’90s, with total circulation reaching 1.5m.
However, these two sectors, along with teen football titles, have seen dwindling circulations and, in the case of computer gaming titles, a spate of closures and mergers, during the last eighteen months. The fashion/music sector’s total circulation for the Jan-Jun period was 2.06m, over 100,000 short of its total five years ago and down almost 300,000 year on year. The computer gaming sector, with under 90,000, managed less than a third of its sales peak in 1999.
New technology may be partly to blame. Teenagers have been the vanguard of text-message usage and, according to a recent Jupiter MMXI report, make up 12% of the European online population. With the most popular web destinations including retail, entertainment and news sites, there is a new challenge to traditional print providers of essential teenage information such as Sugar, Attic Futura’s market leader, which saw an 11.4% year on year decrease this period.
Down is not necessarily out in the magazine market however, as the Women’s Monthly market has proved in this audit. BBC Worldwide showed its confidence recently by launching Star, a title designed to extend the obsession with all things celebrity, demonstrated by Heat‘s success, down to teenage level; it gained a respectable 130,493 opening circulation. In addition, September promises the long-awaited arrivals of junior versions of Emap’s Elle and Natmags’ Cosmopolitan, which could prompt a return to favour for teen titles.
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