Overview of Industry

Overview of Magazine Industry

There are more than 8000 titles published in Britain which can be categorised as follows the consumer sold in new agents and available online, business/trade/professional for people at work, customer magazines that organisations to give to their customers as a form of marketing, staff magazine to inform staff about their company, newspaper supplements these come free as part of daily or Sunday paper, part works this is a set number of issues that builds up into an ‘encyclopaedia’ on a specific topic, and finally academic journals these are for university-level discussions. Consumer magazines make up the bulk of the titles for sale in newsagents. These may be general titles that aim to entertain and inform for example, Loaded, Elle, and Radio Times or there also are consumer specialist titles that are aimed at a specific interest or hobby such as Car, Total Film, and Gardeners world.

The biggest consumer magazine publishers (by 2008 salves revenue in newsagents):

Bauer publishing 25%

IPC Media 20%

BBC 7.8%

National magazine company 7.3%

However Immediate Media bought out BBC Magazine in October 2011.

 Today in the UK there is over 3,200 different consumer titles in 1980 there were 1,383 this is a massive difference and it tells us the Media is growing rapidly. 1.4 billion Magazines are sold each year whereas in 1970 2.1 billion where sold and in 1992 1.2 billion were sold this therefore shows that people don’t by as many magazines anymore because you can get them online and on the news. 85% of the population reads a magazine this is still quite a high percentage. Advertisers spent £745 million in magazines in 2008 and consumers spend £2 billion on magazines annually. An average of 500 new magazines has been launched every year in the past decade. But only 3 in 10 titles survive for more than 4 years in the media industry.

The top five women’s monthly magazines in 2013 are Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Yours, Woman & Home and Good housekeeping. The top five children’s and teen magazines were Moshi Monsters Magazine, Fun to learn – Peppa pig, Fun to learn – Friends, CBebbies Art and Top of the Pops. Whereas the top four male lifestyle magazines are Men’s Health, Nuts, FHM and GQ.