Magazine Lecture #1

The first magazine was the “Gentleman’s magazine” which was launched in 1731 in London. This wasn’t your stereotypical “lads mag” like we’re familiar with today, instead it consisted of more political and economic content.

It took longer for women’s magazines to appear, with “Dress” and “Vanity Fair” both launching in 1913. “Vogue UK” wasn’t released until 1916, and was only launched due to the fact that during wartime “American Vogue” couldn’t be shipped to the UK.

There are around 3,000 print magazines in the UK today, covering four different markets; business, professional, consumer and specialist consumer. However there is very little brand loyalty when it comes to the consumer “glossy” magazines. People are fickle and advertising on the front page is key, an article on the front saying “100 ways to have an orgasm” is enough to make a reader switch publication. This is evident across the magazine industry where publications are closed down frequently, for example “Maxim” and “Arena” closed in 2009 and “More!” closed in 2013. Whereas in specialist and business publications loyalty is key, people want accuracy and reliability which requires the publication to have a strong reputation.

Magazines are led by advertising in a very different way to newspapers. Magazines will regularly print articles entirely focused around advertising or reviewing certain products. They also print large full page advertisements throughout their publication. A perfect example of this is “Vogue”, in 2007  it ran 2,020 pages of advertising at an average of £16,000 per page, providing an income of £32million. “Vogue” is infamous for its high end advertisements, and in many cases this provides another incentive for the reader to buy it, it’s an opportunity to see the newest high end items.

As the industry changes and becomes more digitally focused magazines need to adapt to keep up with the trends. This is often done through supplying online subscriptions and Ipad editions, however this can have a backlash as it can cause print sales to fall. For example “Marie Claire’s” print sales have dropped by 14% since 2009. It could then be presumed that this would have been offset by digital sales, however they were just 1,764 in the first half of 2013.

The future of magazines is clearly going to be digitally based, and this is only going to be accelerated by the development of applications such as “Flipboard” which give the reader more choice and freedom to build their own magazine collection adapted to their specific tastes and needs.

Two surprising facts:
1) The top 3 selling magazines in the UK are; “TV Choice”, “What’s On TV” and “Radio Times”
2) Tesco magazine over took “The Sun” in terms of readership in 2012.