It’s coming up to the usual February half-yearly magazine ABC time and, as is becoming usual these days, Media Week is faced with a quandary as to how to cover it.
On the one hand, there is little doubt that print magazine circulations are in general declining. Our sneak previews into the men’s and women’s monthly and weekly markets show no signs that this trend is set to end.
On the other hand, as Dennis Publishing’s chief executive James Tye points out in this week’s print issue of Media Week, the web sites and digital operations of all magazines are expanding exponentially and attracting lots of traffic and unique users. Tye points out that Maxim now attracts 776,000 monthly unique users, over twice the audience the print title had at its peak. Digital-only products such as Dennis’s Monkey are also being successfully developed. So, the news isn’t all bad for the magazine sector.
Now it’s not Media Week’s job to be a cheerleader for the sector; it is our job to report facts and trends accurately and in a balanced fashion, highlighting negatives as well as positive developments in equal measure.
However, as the premier title for the media industry - print and online hopefully - we have no desire to foster an atmosphere of doom and gloom about any media sector, including magazines.
But it is significant that Dennis, whilst naturally delighted at the traffic it is attracting to its digital brand extensions, chooses not to obtain an ABCe certificate for Maxim.
Until all magazine publishers, ABC and ABCe can get round a table and thrash out a scenario where digital traffic is also measured, or an overall reach figure is calculated for each magazine brand, the magazine sector is faced with the prospect of being hamstrung by the biannual doom-fest that the magazine ABCs are becoming.
