Main Task: Overview of the Magazine Industry

Here, I am going to assess the magazine industry as a whole; looking as facts and figures, top selling magazines, top selling music magazines, how much is spent on buying magazines and how much advertisers spend on placing their products in magazines.

Top selling magazines

Shown above is a list of the top 10 magazines in the UK and Ireland by sales according to the latest ABC statistics as of February 2015. If you are trying to market your own magazine, this an excellent resource for quantitative research as you can see what kinds of magazines have made it big and try to find a unique titles that have no already been created, and you can find out what your customers want.

It shows here that ‘TV Choice’ is the absolute top selling magazine in the UK and Ireland. Judging that the second most successful magazine – ‘What’s on TV’ – is also in the TV Listings category, we can assume that this is the most popular category in this area. However, 6/10 categories featured on this list are of the Women’s weeklies category, proving solidly that this is the most popular choice of type of magazine.

Top selling music magazines

1.       Q

2.       Rolling Stone

3.       Entertainment Weekly

4.       Billboard

5.       Blender

6.       Alternative Press

7.       Paste

8.       Vibe

9.       NME

10.   Spin

Shown above is a list of the top 10 music magazines (according to this website http://top40.about.com/od/top10lists/tp/musicmagazines.htm ). It seems that these magazines have been around for some time now, and therefore well-known across generations.

How much is spent on magazines?

Shown here is a list of fifteen magazines, showing the circulation figures for each one. Circulation for the first six months of 2014 is followed by the figure same period a year earlier, the percentage change year on year and then the digital edition sales (where applicable).
Magazines aimed at young children (Barbie, Ben 10) seem to do very well generally, most likely because families see these titles advertised on TV, in stores, books etc., and children respond to familiarity very well. It would make sense that many of these magazine are distributed in areas where children will see and want them.
(Fun fact: The most successful magazine to launch is Forever Sports, which debuted with a monthly paid-for circulation of 62,277.)

How much do advertisers spend on placing their products in magazines?

The cost of advertising in a magazine very much depends on the magazine you want you advert to appear in.

Smaller, perhaps local magazines are likely to charge much less than national magazines with millions of readers/subscribers, since a lot more people are going to see your placement there.

Also, the cost of the advert is largely dependent of the size you make it. For example, if your ad is of smaller scale and on a quarter-page, you can imagine it will not cost as much as a full-page advert.

Magazines are also likely to charge less par advert when you run your ad in more than one issue of the magazine. If you run it for six issues at the cost of £1,500 per advert, you would be paying a total of £9,000.

The colour and positioning of the advertisement are also a factor. Ads that are in black and white cost the minimal amount, whereas two or three colour ads cost more than that, and full colour ads will cost more still. On the insides of the front and back cover are spaces specifically for advertisements, and this is where the size makes another big impact. A full page ad on the back of the front cover can cost as much as £142,000 at an estimate!