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.
It’s easy to get carried away with words; to exaggerate or overhype everyday events. But the challenge when describing the recent changes in the US market is how to do justice to what really were seismic events. John Harrington looks at what happened
Too often we take our printers for granted. We don’t give them a lot of thought, until something goes wrong, when all hell breaks loose. Not all printers are the same, and price isn’t always the best differentiator between them. Choosing the right pr
Former Marie Claire editor, Marie O’Riordan, has swapped consumer publishing for customer publishing ... and has found it a liberating experience! John Brown’s new editor-in-chief tells Meg Carter about the dynamism of the sector and about the immine
The winners of The PPA Awards 2009 were announced last night with IPC’s Nuts and Reed Business Information’s XpertHR winning consumer and business media brands of the year.
The Mail Consolidators Association is working with a select number of industry stakeholders striving for improved quality in international mail consolidation, presentation and delivery.
Defying the recession, Touch, an international B2B publisher that provides information for the pharmaceutical, medical and energy industries, announced at its AGM that it was continuing to grow its online and journal readership.
Dorling Kindersley has announced a new publishing partnership with one of the UK’s leading cookery magazines delicious. The two book deal was brokered by DK’s Stephanie Jackson, Luigi Bonomi of LBA, and Seamus Geoghegan of delicious. Magazine.
Conor McNicholas, currently editing IPC’s music title NME, has been appointed as the new editor of BBC’s Top Gear magazine.
In a report published this month, the Stationers, a City of London Livery Company, predict that by 2020 the demand for graphic papers will have declined to the level of the last decade of the 20th Century!
BBC One’s Famous, Rich and Homeless star John Bird, Founder of The Big Issue magazine, which is sold by homeless people is to launch in Lahore, Pakistan.
Seymour Distribution has announced that it has secured the contract to distribute Fire Publishing’s entire portfolio of magazines, with effect from 1st July 2009.
VNU Entertainment Media UK Ltd have appointed dsb.net to manage customer management for its range of online and offline products from The Bookseller.
Visitors to the Historic Dockyard in Chatham this Saturday will have an exclusive chance to experience Kent’s War, a unique website created by the KM Group.
Nstein Technologies has announced that Newssift, a business insight tool launched by FT Search Inc has launched its beta powered by Nstein's TME (Text Mining Engine).
The APA, the representative organisation for the customer publishing industry, has launched a new an initiative to engage media planners and continue to bolster the growth achieved by the medium.
