Posted on 08/22/2006 4:34:27 AM PDT by abb
American newsstands sold fewer magazines in the first half of 2006 compared with the period a year ago, as some markets were saturated with too many offerings and others had to compete with the Web.
Newsstand sales of magazines fell more than 4 percent, to about 48.7 million copies, in the first half of 2006, according to preliminary figures provided by magazine publishers to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
Among domestic newsweeklies, Time magazine reported the biggest fall in newsstand sales, a drop of 24 percent.
The magazine, published by the Time Inc. division of Time Warner, plans to move its publication day to Friday from Monday to attract more readers on the weekend and increase sales.
Samir Husni, chairman of the journalism department at the University of Mississippi, said magazine sales had fallen because many readers were spending more time on the Internet, and because of a thicket of similarly themed titles.
“In a country where you have 22 magazines telling you about shoes, you know that all 22 magazines can’t have a circulation of a million,” Mr. Husni said.
John Harrington, a newsstand sales analyst and publisher of The New Single Copy newsletter, said a softer retail market contributed to the downturn.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Ping
I used to subscribe to Newsweek years ago until they put Newt Grinrich on the cover and titled it "The Loser."
"The magazine, published by the Time Inc. division of Time Warner, plans to move its publication day to Friday from Monday to attract more readers on the weekend and increase sales."
Yes, I know that all week long I look forward to Fridays so I can buy Time magazine and spend all weekend reading it. This should drop their sales by about another 26%.
Good news.
It appears they want to blame the "economy" with "softer retail market contributed to the downturn"
I don't read these rags on the web either!
That's better.
TIME is one of the worst of the RAT party mouthpieces. Good riddance to another lefty -- let's see what is the word for below the tabloid level??-- rag.
Er...wasn't me...
More...
http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=111425
Magazines Mark Down Tough First-Half for Circulation
Audit Bureau Paid-Circulation Rule Change Affects Most Top Titles
By Nat Ives
Published: August 21, 2006
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- The impact of a major change in the way the Audit Bureau of Circulations tallies a magazine's circulation was revealed today, as the bureau released its data for the first half of 2006 this morning.
Those figures reveal for the first time the effect of removing public-place circulation -- titles found in doctors' offices and beauty parlors -- from the paid column and placing them under the new label "verified." The advent of verified matters because publishers have traditionally pegged their ad rates to paid circulations -- which until now included many public-place copies.
Verified category
Verified circulation accounted for less than 3% of the magazines' paid and verified totals, according to the Audit Bureau's report, but at some titles that figure was much higher. AARP The Magazine reported nearly 1 million verified copies, the most of any title in absolute numbers, for 4.3% of its paid and verified total.
But Travel & Leisure Golf, part of American Express Publishing, reported 375,153 verified copies, a full 58.9% of its paid and verified circulation -- the highest proportion of verified circulation at any magazine. Time4 Media's Ski was a close second by that measure, with 253,016 verified copies, 55.2% of its paid and verified total.
Dawn of verified
The verified dawn showed itself in other ways. Time Inc.'s Time ranked seventh among the top 25 magazines ranked by paid and verified totals, but 10th among titles by paid circulation. Meredith's Family Circle ranked eighth on the paid and verified list but came in sixth for paid circulation alone.
Even with public-place and certain other copies shifted in "verified," though, many of the reigning paid-circulation champs held their positions. AARP held on to the top spot, with average paid circulation of 22.1 million, down 2.2% from the first half of 2005. Reader's Digest, Meredith's Better Homes & Gardens, National Geographic and Hearst's Good Housekeeping held onto their second-through-fifth slots as well, although all also lost some circulation.
Declines in top 25
Among the top 25 consumer titles by average paid circulation, most were down. TV Guide had the biggest percentage drop, down 59.02% to 3.4 million, due to a deliberate reduction in its rate base earlier this year. Hearst's O, The Oprah Magazine dropped nearly 11% to 2.3 million. That follows a 9.3% decline in average paid circulation in the second half of last year, which the publisher said was intentionally engineered through high subscription pricing in an effort to get numbers down to the rate base of 2.2 million.
Time Inc.'s People was one of the few that manage to maintain its circulation, which remained at 3.8 million.
All the reporting celebrity weeklies continued as grow, although American Media's Star fell 14.4% on newsstands. But more intriguing, perhaps: The newest entry, Richard Desmond's U.S. edition of OK, did not appear in the Audit Bureau report anywhere. This, despite Mr. Desmond's claim to Advertising Age in June that the title would probably report average paid circulation of 534,000 copies in what was to be its inaugural publisher's statement. Turns out ABC is still working on OK's first audit, which must be completed before the magazine can start turning in publisher's statements.
Teen titles
The teen-magazine category has cleared out with the loss of Hachette Filipacchi's Elle Girl and Time Inc.'s Teen People this year. But Conde Nast's Teen Vogue lost circulation, as expected, when some subscribers of the defunct YM who were receiving Teen Vogue in its place failed to re-up with the replacement. Paid subscriptions at Teen Vogue fell 44.1% to 729,778 and overall paid circulation fell 37.9% to 948,555. Com
I hope the individual owners of newstands are also selling popcorn to supplement their loss of income.
They'll have to go the way of gas stations; add a convenience store.
As with a slump in the recording industry, maybe these news maagazines are not producing anything worth buying.
Maybe it is the medium.
But maybe it is the message that people are not buying.
The cover sells at the Newsstand. Which covers DID SELL and which covers DID NOT SELL?
It might be a good move. As it stands now, my weekends are completely ruined, waiting in unbearable agony for Monday to come around so I can buy Time. SARC
More "Time Has Come Today."
His Girl Friday
http://www.slate.com/id/2148101/
I haven't read any of the rags for years literally decades.
I picked up a Newsweel while in a waiting room and started to laugh--Newsweek used to be a fairly thick glossy rag. Noticed US News and World Report and Time as well. They are all more like the thickness of a coupon section of a small town grocery store. All the advertizers have apparently fled and the remaining ads are as lame as the content of the magazine.
Time should change the name to Hard Times. Quite remarkable reduction in comparison to the fat news mags of the seventies.
Yeah I wonder how many figures the bright guy that came up with this makes. Whats next? Trying to sell it outside of football stadiums on Sunday.
"Those figures reveal for the first time the effect of removing public-place circulation -- titles found in doctors' offices and beauty parlors -- from the paid column and placing them under the new label "verified." The advent of verified matters because publishers have traditionally pegged their ad rates to paid circulations -- which until now included many public-place copies."
Excellent. Most Doctors, dentists and other health professionals haven't paid for Time/Slime, Newsweak and other pseudo news mags for at least a decade.
Yet these scumbag companies have been Enronning their advertisers with cooked books re paid circulation sales for decades.
The place where I get my monthly hair trimming, hasn't paid for a subscription for any magazine for well over a decade. The owner removed Slime/NewsWeak/ and USDNCNewsReports after several of us complained about their covers re our President, his cabinet and our military. She just throws them into the recycle container when they arrive in the junk mail bags.
More...
http://www.medialifemagazine.com/artman/publish/article_6797.asp
TV Guide takes its
mega circulation hit
Slides 59 percent as part of its makeover
By Samantha Melamed
Aug 22, 2006
In a bold move just over a year ago, TV Guide slashed its rate base by two thirds as part of a radical makeover in which it dumped its digest format and listings to become a full-size entertainment magazine in direct competition with the likes of Entertainment Weekly.
That's led to a huge hemorrhaging of readers compared to the year earlier period--some 5 million--as the magazine trimmed its subscriber rolls. That's according to the most recent report on magazine circulation by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, out yesterday. TV Guide reported a circulation of 3,718,175, a decline of 59 percent for the six-month period ending June 30 versus the same six months the year earlier.
In size, that puts TV Guide just behind People at 3,823,604.
That's still a very comfortable 518,000 over its 3.2 million rate base, and the magazine says it has no plans to slash it rate base again. Some 3 million of the old rate base were sponsored sales, copies given out in hotels rooms and such, and they are now gone, which should make the magazine more attractive to advertisers.
But whether the new format will succeed is still an open question. To say the least, the entertainment or celeb category is crowded, and TV Guide came late to it, maybe too late. Or that was the sense of media buyers when the new format was announced last July. One positive indicator is that its newsstand sales were off a comparatively modest 4.5 percent, to 300,231 for the six-month period.
Meanwhile, overall newsstand sales for consumer magazines were down notably from the first half of 2005, declining more than 4 percent, to 48.7 million single-copy sales. Total circulation was up 2 percent, to 378.9 million copies, but paid subscriptions were down 4 percent, attributable to the ABC's restructuring of circulation delivered to public places, while total subscriptions were flat.
The declines reflect a confluence of longer-term trends, and they include a decline in the number of newsstand outlets nationwide and other changes within the distribution system that serve to reduce consumers' exposure at retail. But there's also a sense that there is a growing samenesss among titles competing for readers’ attention, as in the once-hot celebrity category.
Newsstand declines were scattered across a number of categories.
Among newsweeklies, Time magazine was down 24 percent in newsstand sales, ahead of its switch to Friday publication, Overall, it saw a 1.2 percent circulation gain, reflecting a 2.2 percent rise in paid subscriptions.
In the shelter category, every title but Elle Décor saw significant dips in newsstand sales, and so did half the parenting titles, with Child down 67.4 percent.
The women's service and lifestyle titles felt soft newsstand sales as well, with declines for O The Oprah Magazine (19.5 percent), Better Homes and Gardens (18.5 percent), Redbook (19.9 percent) and Woman's Day (23.6 percent).
But among the losses, there were impressive gainers. More was up 25.1 percent in single-copy.
Also up at retail: Vanity Fair (17 percent), Elle (18 percent), The Economist (15 percent) and Men's Health (10 percent). BusinessWeek, Forbes and Inc. were all up in single-copy sales, though BusinessWeek saw a decline in total circulation, a result of declining subscriptions, which were off 5.8 percent.
Among the celebrity titles, Bauer's Life & Style Weekly was up 48.3 percent in single-copy, while People was up 2.6 percent. In Touch was up 5.3 percent. Bob Davidowitz, the publisher of InTouch and Life & Style, says that he's expecting growth to continue. He attributes Life & Style's success to its distinct niche: a celebrity-oriented service title of fashion, beauty and lifestyle.
By contrast, Entertainment Weekly saw a 24 percent decline on the newsstands, Star was down 14.4 percent and Premiere fell 12.3 percent.
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