Magazine Industry Overview

Magazine Industry Overview. There are over 8000 magazine titles published in the UK, there are many different categories which are consumer (general and specialist) sold in newsagents and available online; the most popular media texts sold in newsagents. The aim of this type of magazine is to entertain and inform the reader, business / trade / professional - for people at work, customer magazines that organisations to give to their customers as a form of marketing, staff magazines to inform staff about their company, newspaper supplements - come free as part of daily or Sunday paper, part works - a set number of issues builds up into an 'encyclopaedia' on a specific topic and finally academic journals - for university-level discussion of all sorts of topics. The UK’s largest magazine publisher by circulation is Baeur Media; it publishes 25% of the UK’s magazines. Next is Time Warner which publishes 20%, third is BBC which takes up 7.8%, and fourth is Hearst which is 7.3% of the publishing industry. Today in the UK there are over 3,200 different consumer titles, 1.5 billion titles are sold every year, from online subscriptions to over-the-counter buys. In 2008 advertisers spent £745M to get their titles seen. Consumers spent £2B on magazines, which is a very large number. In the last decade, it is said that over 500 different magazines are launched every year so these numbers rise more every year, although only 3 in 4 magazines survive in the industry for more than 4 years. History Of Magazines: 1950s: Launched in 1953, Playboy mixed high commerce, sex and glamour explosively for the first time. 1960s: First published in 1967, Rolling Stone was an emblem of the spirit of dissent and lack of deference that marked the 1970s. 1970s: The 1972 UK launch of Cosmopolitan offered women entry to a previously male world of power-play and sexual freedom. 1990s: In 1994 Loaded ushered in the era of neo-traditional lads who drank, laughed and shagged. (related cultural products: Men Behaving Badly, Liam Gallagher, Gazza, Chris Evans) 2000s: Today Heat, Hello, OK, Grazia etc. offer an 'in-depth' look at the shallow celebrity culture of the new century. 2001: Glamour (2001) is way out in front as the leading women’s monthly glossy. (Related cultural product: Sex and the City.) “We launched at a time when it was OK to be glamorous again.” Elvin, Editor 2004: Zoo (motto ‘Beer, breasts and Footy) (EMAP) and Nuts (supposed to be more up-market) (IPC) The world’s first ever Men’s Weekly Magazines 2005: Psychologies (launched 2005) “What we’re like, not just what we look like” for women 30 – 55, glossy but not fashion-led. 2009: Eat In Recession bites? Comfort food to make yourself.