Overview of the Magazine Industry

Major Companies There are a lot of different magazine publishers but the main ones are Bauer, IPC, BBC and National Magazines. These companies are in constant competition with each other but according to the 2008 sales revenue in newsagents, revenue for these magazines looked like this:

1.       Bauer Publishing               25%
2.       IPC Media                           20%
3.       BBC Magazines                  7.8%
4.       National Magazines          7.3%

Size of Industry The magazine industry can be split into four groups; consumer magazines (general and specialist), business magazines, customer magazines and newspaper supplements. Consumer magazines are things that the general public would buy like Empire, NME, OK and Car. Business magazines are published specifically for people in work. They are magazines like Press Gazette and Campaign. Customer magazines are published to give customers of some products and places and are usually free. These can be magazines like Sky TV and Waitrose Food Illustrated. Newspaper supplements are free magazine that come with certain newspapers, for example, the weekly TV listings comes with the Sun. The magazines I’ll be concentrating most on are consumer magazines. At present, in the UK, there are over 3,200 different consumer magazine titles overall, 1.4 billion magazines are sold each year, 85% of the population reads at least one magazine a year, advertisers will spend approximately £745 billion in magazines each year and consumers spend about £2 billion on magazines annually. A lot of new magazines are created (on average 500 a year) however, only 3 out of 10 of these will survive more than four years.

Current Trends Magazines look to give their readers the latest news on the subject the magazine concentrates on. A magazine will be successful if they are “with the times”. This means they will look at social and cultural ideas of today and may even challenge them. Moreover, they would introduce different ideas to their readers, even if some of them could disagree. Magazines will also look to different types of technology, for example, websites. A lot of magazines will have a website now in comparison to twenty years ago because of technology development. Magazines are also started to make their magazines a lot less text based and more image based.

Impact of Technology Technology has had a huge impact on the magazine industry; now a magazine can have a radio station, a website, a TV channel and Podcasts. A magazine having any of these things can also be a sign of how successful they have been with their magazines. They are able to expand the things they print to other forms of media. Also, you can purchase magazines to read on a tablet or an E-Book reader, so a person doesn’t have to go out and buy the magazine; the industry has been completely paper based until now.