Consumer magazines spent most of the past two decades managing decline. The more confident publishers have stopped doing that. Newsstand sales and print advertising are still shrinking, but well-made titles with loyal readers are raising cover prices and growing.
Scale matters less than it did. Bauer has made Grazia a more premium product and charged more for it, while independents such as Anthem have put print back at the centre of the business and grown their export sales. Stylist has changed format several times without losing its readers. Others have gone the other way, and Gay Times dropped print entirely to build a global audience online.
For most consumer publishers, print is our USP. It’s the anchor that makes advertisers trust us and the very thing that readers want from us.
Jon Bickley Our print strategy: Anthem
Behind the confidence sits some hard arithmetic. Newstrade is now a small share of revenue and events and ecommerce are growing from a low base. Trust has become a selling point as AI fills the web with content of uncertain origin, but the paid-for consumer model that works at scale is still being worked out.
Below you'll find some of our best feature articles on consumer magazines, from premium print and cover pricing to brand extensions, membership and the future of specialist titles, alongside our latest news and industry commentary.
For a while now, magazine publishers have been on the defensive, unsure about the viability of their traditional business model in a fast-changing world. Katie Vanneck-Smith wants to change all that.
We asked Tamar Riley, portfolio managing director at Immediate, what does best practice publishing look like in consumer media? This is what she said…
For premium titles like Grazia, Mojo and Empire, growth is increasingly coming not from extending reach but from deepening engagement with existing passionate audiences, as Lauren Holleyoake tells Ciar Byrne.
The printed magazine will be a cherished part of people’s lives for years to come, says Jon Bickley, co-founder and CEO. That is why it’s the key component in Anthem’s publishing strategy.
With the arrival of AI and the widespread availability of unattributable content, specialist publishers need to ensure that their titles are the trusted go-to brands in their sectors, Our Media’s Andy Marshall tells Ciar Byrne.
Stylist’s mission has been clear from day one: to engage with its female audience in an intelligent, positive and non-exploitative way. 16 years on, and current PPA Media Brand of the Year, they are staying true to those values, says Lisa Smosarski.
Gay Times was stuck in a rut, tied to its traditional publishing model and reaching only a small part of the LGBTQ+ community. Under the editorship of Lewis Corner, that began to change, as he explains to Ciar Byrne.
Whatever the rest of 2024 holds, two things are certain. Firstly, the bumpy economic ride will continue. Secondly, the need for media companies to have a broad base of revenue streams has never been more important or more challenging to achieve.
How do you create a specialist consumer media business that is fit for the future? What steps do you need to take to be resilient and flexible as audiences and technology evolve? Carolyn Morgan researched 20 innovators from across Europe to find out.
For many publishers, circulation is all about chasing volume, but they would be much better off chasing profitability, says Natalie Smith, client relationship manager at Warners.
With advertising revenues under increasing strain, subscription revenues have never seemed so attractive and, says Carolyn Morgan, the potential for making money out of your readers goes way beyond the subscription transaction itself.
Ask any publisher what makes their title special and they will reply ‘content’. Yet, says Gill Hudson, the amount publishers pay their contributors has declined so much that one has to question if they value content half as much as they say they do…
Putting the reader at the centre of everything it does, and measuring their every interaction with the site, has helped The Student Room double its traffic in the past three years. Jack Wallington explains how the site used its own social platform to
In the whirlwind of modern media consumption, it has never been more important to increase engagement with your publication, be it online or in print. As Martin Stephens, MD of PA Images, tells James Evelegh, pictures are a great way of engaging with
When it comes to embracing mobile, retailers have been much quicker off the mark than publishers. Matt Kelly applauds the “bold minimalism” of the Mr Porter app.
The US newsstand industry is in disaster recovery mode, writes Karlene Lukovitz, following the late-May demise of the nation's second-largest wholesaler, Source Interlink Distribution (SID), which had an estimated 30% share of the magazine retail dis
On 22 May, the PPA held its annual conference in the open plan basement setting of B1, Location House in London. The theme of the day was ‘reinvention’ and what consumer publishers needed to do to create a profitable future. James Evelegh was there.
The past twelve months have seen a significant reconfiguration of algorithms, as search engines seek to hone search results through a better understanding of user intent. Some of these changes have gone unnoticed by the casual observer, but writes Am
Traditional local media is in turmoil. Latest estimates show more than 100 newspapers have closed in the last five years and others switched from daily to weekly publication. But community magazines - some still close to their kitchen table roots and
Why are publishers blaming all of our ills on the digital revolution? Peter Jackson suggests there’s another major factor which has been overlooked – and there is historical evidence that magazines can find a way to bounce back.
David Hepworth's regular column, in the July / August 2014 issue of InPublishing magazine.
Jim Foster’s regular column, looking at the world of ePublishing, in the July/August 2014 issue of InPublishing magazine.
However brilliant the strategy and execution of your renewal series, customers will not renew unless they have engaged with your publication over the previous twelve months. Fostering engagement is therefore the key to achieving high renewal rates, w
One of the UK’s leading specialist consumer publishers is using programmatic trading of its online inventory to give advertisers more choice and improve consumer targeting - and at the same time lift its own CPMs. Jo Bowman reports.
‘Planning’ and ‘Digital’ are two words which do not sit very comfortably together. If ‘digital’ is all about being agile, fast-moving, responsive, silo-busting and questioning accepted norms; then ‘planning’ feels as though it should be about order,
