Outlook On The Magazine Business

All the 8000+ titles published in Britain can be separated into their own categories. These categories consist of consumer (sold in newsagents and available online), business/trade/professional/B2B (for the working class), staff magazines (to inform about their company, for the staff), newspaper supplements (come free with certain newspapers), part works (a number of issues which is built up into a type of ‘encyclopaedia’ on a specific topic) and academic journals (for university-level discussion). Consumer magazines make up the bulk of the titles for sale in newsagents. Like ‘Loaded’, ‘Elle’ or ‘Radio Times’ they may be aimed to entertain and inform or consumer specialist titles aimed at a specific interest or hobby like ‘Car’, ‘Total Film’ and ‘Gardeners’ World’. The biggest consumer magazine publishers by 2008 sales were Bauer Publishing with 25%, Time Warner with 20%, BBC with 7.8% and Hearst with 7.3%. There are over 3200 different consumer titles today in the UK with over 1.4 billion magazines being sold each year compared to 2.1 billion in 1970 and 1.2 billion in 1992. It is known that 85% of the population reads a magazine of some kind. Advertisers in 2008 spent £745 million in magazines. By the end of 2014 it is expected that more would have been spent of mobile advertising, which is set to surge by 83%. Consumers spend £2 billion on magazines annually. An average of 500 new magazines has been launched every year in the past decade, with only 3 in 10 titles surviving for more than 4 years. All media products emerge from a cultural context and society. An example can be shown in Cosmopolitan, which was launched in 1972 in the UK and offered women to a previously male world, giving more freedom and less dominance. Another example would be of Glamour magazine, which was launched in 2001 and is a way in front as the leading women’s monthly glossy. In the 2000s magazines such as Heat, Hello, OK and Grazia were launched, showing an ‘in-depth’ look at the shallow celebrity culture.