Bauer leads decline as British magazines record historic falls
“I think that’s one of the worst ABCs I’ve ever seen, if not the worse,” said MEC’s press director Rob Lynam after the Audit Bureau of Circulations’ data for the first six months of 2011.
Turns out he wasn’t wrong. At no other time in the 21st Century have more than three quarters of the Top 100 actively purchased magazines fallen both period on period (-76%) and year on year (-77%).In fact, you could probably go back much further into the ABCs 67 year history and still struggle to find comparable falls across the board (if the ABC data was made available). It accentuates a trend that has resulted in total sales of the top 100 magazines falling by almost a third since 2000, from 31 million to 22.8 million today.
Little wonder then that publishers, led by PPA’s chief executive Barry McIlheney, wanted to shift the focus away from newsstands altogether this month, in favour of their “multi-platform expansion”. The argument follows that behind the gruesome headlines and record lows, most magazine brands in the top flight have never been so widely consumed, or as influential.
It’s based on the premise that once print circs are combined with digital sales, website users, Twitter followers and Facebook ‘likes’, for example, even a publication with less than 30,000 copy sales, like IPC’s NME, becomes more relevant than it was 30 years earlier, despite selling ten times fewer copies.
Well, possibly. Staying with the music mag for a moment, back in 1980, when NME was averaging now unbelievable circulations of 230,000, the media landscape was entirely different; there was no MTV, no digital radio and, of course, no internet – just for starters. The music brand could potentially make a splash with every issue.
In today’s fragmented media mix, do a few hundred thousand page impressions, even when accompanied by a digital radio station, social media activity and event sponsorship packages, make NME a bigger force? It’s hard to deduce for certain.
Sales of digital editions of magazines, recently introduced into the ABC figures, are easier to quantify, but they remain depressingly low. As Campaign’s ABC analysis underlined, of the 16 titles that received an audit for their digital editions, only two – Hello! and Men’s Health – managed to sell more than 1,000 copies.
For all the talk of iPads and tablets, and the creation of new production jobs and consolidated sales forces, digital editions, at present, appear to account for less than 1% of leading magazine sales.
“Many publishers have been able to increase a brand’s reach but are struggling to really monetise it,” notes Lynam. “The new readers, or users, are currently simply not as valuable.”
Jane Wolfson, head of non broadcast at Initiative, also notes that from an advertiser point of view, “numbers in digital sales remain too small”.
“Creating digital editions is a very expensive business,” she says. “Empire’s iPad edition for example is pretty impressive, but it’s still early days and advertisers need to understand the numbers. Publishers are still experimenting, it’s all still a bit underground and behind the scenes.”
So print continues to generate the lions share of revenue in consumer publishing, around 86% according to PPA research. This shifts the spotlight firmly back onto traditional print circs, where the downward trends dominate.
Andy Taylor, trading director at Aegis Media, believes some publishers are failing to nurture their print products. “Figures are down, people are buying fewer magazines – which must sit at the heart of the business – so where’s the innovation, where’s the investment?” he asks.
Where is the innovation?
Bauer Media has been the worst hit during the turbulent period, with total copy sales tumbling 6.4% period on period, and 11.5% year on year. Rivals Hearst fell 3.7% period on period and 4.2% year on year, IPC down 3.1% and 2.9%, Conde Nast was up 1.5% and down 1%, while BBC Magazines – in probably its last ABC report before it’s sold, once again defied the market by falling 0.2% period on period but being the only major publisher to achieve annual growth, up 1.1%.
At least one media buyer believes Bauer’s falls reflect a lack of investment in its portfolio, including its cash cows Heat, Closer, Grazia and More, said to collectively represent more than 75% of Bauer’s total display income.
Bauer chief executive Paul Keenan baulks at the idea: “I absolutely contest that. If by investment they mean short-term discounts, covermounts, and reliance on multi-pack buys, then yes, we are trying to invest less in those areas.
“We’re trying to position our products to win on quality editorial, not unsustainable discounting. We, like all other magazine publishers, have gone down that road in the past but it’s untenable.
“Heat is in the middle of improvement and differentiation. When it launched it had its own unique tone of voice that has been much copied and aped over the years. We recognise we need to move it on again to maintain that point of difference.
“We’re not going to multi-pack it every week. We’re not going to discount it, in fact we’ve put the cover price up. We have used multi-packs of Heat and Closer in the past as samplers but we have found that, like cover mounting, these things tend to become expected. It has diminishing returns.”
Bauer’s chief does concede the industry “always need to innovate” and to “constantly explore new ways of engaging”, and hints at a number of initiatives designed to do just that in the second half of 2011.
He refuses to be drawn on speculation that a September issue of Grazia will see the return of men’s supplement Gaz7etta, but does say the women’s weekly is on track to record a bumper 300 page special around London Fashion Week.
Change on the horizon
For MEC’s Lynam, the latest ABCs signal a tipping point of sorts for Bauer and beyond. “I think the market will look quite different in the not too distant future,” he says. “Some sectors, like women’s weeklies and celebrity, have been over served for some time.”
Coupled with closures, Lynam believes another challenge is how publishers serve younger readers in the future. He notes that the median ages of most women’s weeklies and monthlies is getting older, due to the closure of big teen titles like J17, Smash Hits, Cosmo Girl and Elle Girl, in recent years.
“A once thriving sector has been decimated that directly fed into magazines’ targeting people in the 20s and it’s having a knock on effect,” he says. I don’t think publishers are adapting to this ageing challenge as quickly as they need to be.”
Keenan concedes the market remains “very challenging”, and notes there is something different about this current situation.
“Historically, magazines used to prove themselves to be ‘an affordable luxury’ in times of a downturn and have grown,” he says. “I think this downturn is different, and the variable that has changed this time around is the amount of competition, both from other magazines and other media.”
