Overview of magazine industry in the UK

Overview of magazine industry in the UK

The magazine industry is a huge industry in today’s media and has been a huge industry for many years. Magazine’s jobs are primarily to inform and entertain, but they can also be used for readers to relate to or use as a way to escape from their everyday lives and just get their heads deep in a good magazine. There are over 8000 titles published in Britain which can be categorised in 7 ways:

1.      Consumer (general and specialist) – sold in newsagents and online

2.      Business / trade / professional / B2B – for people at work

3.      Customer magazines that organisations give to their customers as a form of marketing

4.      Staff magazines to inform staff about their company

5.      Newspaper supplements – come free as part of our daily or Sunday paper.

6.      Part works – a set number of issues builds up into an ‘encyclopaedia’ on a specific topic.

7.      Academic journals – for university-level discussion of all sorts of arcane topics

Consumer titles make up the majority of the titles sold in newsagents and are probably the most selling and widely available type of magazine currently available in the UK.

Facts from today in the UK

. There are over 3,200 different consumer titles (in 1980 there were only 1,383)

. 1.4 billion Magazines are sold each year (it was 2.1 billion in 1970 and 1.2 billion in 1992)

. 85% of the population reads a magazine

. Advertisers 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

. Only 3 in 10 titles survive for more than 4 years

The biggest consumer magazine publishers (by 2008 sales revenue in newsagents:

1.      Bauer (Bauer Publishing): 25%

2.      IPC (Time Warner): 20%

3.      BBC Magazines (BBC): 7.8%

4.      National Magazines (Hearst): 7.3%

Although the magazine industry is currently flourishing there are theories that the media format of the magazine may change in the near future and the industry with it. A lot of companies and publishers see the ‘app revolution’ working in their favour as more and more people can download magazines digitally and read them on a number of different media devices. This has advantages such as the money saved by the companies printing and distributing costs being cut out but is a disadvantage to a lot of newsagents who will lose money the more people use apps to download magazines.

To conclude, the magazine industry is standing strong currently making billions of pounds each year, but there is question of it being under threat or even improving due to the ‘app revolution’.