Women fork out pounds to lose pounds

Well here we are again. I am gazing at the 166 page ABC report for consumer magazines. It’s late on a Thursday afternoon and I can feel my eyes zoning out. The last set of results released in the summer solicited the comment from MEC’s press director, Rob Lynam: “I think that’s one of the worst ABCs I’ve ever seen, if not the worst.”

Nothing much has changed six months on. The top 50 actively purchased magazines are down collectively by more than 400,000 copies or 2.5% compared to six months ago. Moreover, it’s not just a few dragging circulation down, 33 of the magazines recorded declines.

Although with Lent fast approaching it struck me how well Slimming World magazine has done. It is now ranked as the 10th highest actively purchased magazine. A year ago it ranked 19th and six months ago 14th. Over 96% of its total distribution is actively purchased (386,000) – up 15% in the second half of 2011.

However, if we dig further into the certificate we can see that Slimming World only sells just over 40% at full rate – £2.75. Therefore 218,000 are classified at a lesser rate, though at what lesser rate is unclear. But ahah, on page 26 there is a figure that on first glance might shed some light on the pricing. Annualised retail value for Slimming World is £8.3 million. However, after hammering at my calculator all this figure represents is the newstrade total multiplied by the full cover price value times the number of publications in the period and doubled (annualised). Are you still with me? All we know is that the lesser rate sales are at a value greater than 50% of the basic cover price.

So what first appeared to be a key insight in the ABC report turns out to tell us very little.

Anyway let’s not decry Slimming World‘s performance. Year on year its full rate sales are up 15,000 but it is the lesser rates that have increased by 45,000 to really shift the overall performance – and it is ranked first for the largest period on period increase for actively purchased magazines.

But the slimming category is just a tenth of the size of the women’s weekly sector. The weeklies distribute over seven million copies and is the second biggest genre behind cookery and kitchen. The sector is suffering and is down nearly 10% compared to six months ago – and is the worst performer among the top magazine categories.

But fear not, digital is here to save the day – editions sold via tablets etc. have not been added to the headline figure yet but they do appear alongside the print figures. The highest number of editions sold in digital format belongs to Men’s Health – selling 7,779.

No publisher is changing the world yet but the key thing is to ensure magazines still have a direct relationship with their reader and the customer data collected from the digital experience is not owned by a third party.

I hope you are looking forward to London Fashion Week as much as I am… I have even been buying the last few editions of Slimming World so that I don’t feel too bad when I see the catwalk imagery.

RIP Zelda.

P.S. Follow me on Twitter! @MTel_GlossyGirl