Magazine Market Cooldown

Launches are a powerful driver of the magazine business and they are a good indicator of the industry’s health.

Last year’s launch activity shows that the market is still very much alive and is stabilising, but is seeing ongoing structural change, with fewer large launches.

Long-term trends in the total magazine market size

The graph (right) shows the total number of consumer magazines listed in BRAD.

The market moves in a series of growth spurts followed by cooling -down periods when there are title clearouts after periods of launch activity.

The most recent growth phase, more modest that the previous one, ran for five years from 2002 to 2006 and saw the market expand at the rate of +2% per year
in terms of title numbers. The market then turned into decline in 2007. This slide accelerated to the -11% slump seen in 2010 before slowing down significantly
in 2011 to -2%.

Yet is this latest ―cooldown period, already a much longer dip than in the past, part of a cycle or the start of a permanent trend?

Trend in regular frequency magazine launches 2005-2011

The graph above zooms in on the more recent cooling-off period and tracks the number of regular frequency launches in each year.

• In 2005, the market was still expanding, boosted by over 450 launches in the year.
• Then in 2006, launch activity dropped dramatically before stabilising over the next three years at around 250 titles per year.
• 2010 was a year of massive churn. The number of launches rose, but so did the number of deaths in what turned out to be a major clearout year. The net effect was the big drop in the total number of titles in the market seen in the top graph.
• Launch activity in 2011 is down on the previous year, but slightly ahead of the previous three years. Couple this with the fact that the number of deaths has reduced below the previous year’s levels, and the total market is looking more robust than last year.