The Magazine Industry

There are more than 8000 titles published in Britain such as:

·         Consumer (general and specialist) sold in newsagents and available online;

·         Business / trade / professional / B2B - 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;

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

Consumer magazines make up the bulk of the titles for sale in newsagents.

The biggest consumer magazine publishers of 2008:

·         Bauer Media (Bauer Publishing) - 25%

·         IPC Media (Time Warner) - 20%

·         BBC - 7.8%

·         National Magazine Company (Hearst) - 7.3%

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