Overview of the Magazine Industry

Overview of the magazine industry

In Britain alone there are over 8000 titles published which can be categorised into the following: Consumer (general and specialist) these are sold in newsagents and available online, business/trade/professional – for people at work, customer magazines that organisations distribute amongst their customers as a marketing strategy, staff magazines which inform staff about their company, newspaper supplements given out free as part of a daily or Sunday paper, academic journals for university-level discussion of all sorts of arcane topics and part works – a set number of issues building up into an encyclopaedia on a specific topic.

Consumer magazines make up the most part of sales in newsagents. They can be either general titles that aim to entertain and inform such as Loaded, Elle, Radio Times or consumer specialist titles aimed at specific interests or hobbies i.e. Car, Total Film, Gardener’s World.

The biggest consumer magazine publishers are: Bauer, Time Warner, BBC and Hearst. In 2014 there are over 3,200 different consumer titles, compared to 1980 when there were only 1,383 – this is more than half the amount of what there is today. 1.4 billion magazines are sold each year, compared to 2.1 billion in 1970 and 1.2 billion in 1992. 85% of the population reads a magazine, advertises spent £745 million in magazines in 2008, consumers spend £2 billion on magazines annually, an average of 500 new magazines have been launched every year in the past decade and only 3 in 10 titles survive for more than 4 years.