In advance of today's release of the latest half-yearly ABC circulation figures for magazines, two writers analyse why they are going to be so poor. Sales of several weeklies are expected to show 10% year-on-year falls, while further declines are predicted for men's and women's monthly titles. Some analysts believe "there will be blood."
Amanda Andrews, in The Times, thinks a major reason for the weeklies going downhill is that readers have had enough of celebrity (I wish!). She points to significant falls in titles that depend on celebrity content, such as Heat, Closer, Now and Reveal.
But she concedes that OK!, New and Star, which depend entirely on celebrity material, are likely to record sales rises.
In the face of the continuing decline of men's magazines, Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, media editor at the Financial Times, profiles a title that is supposedly bucking the trend. ShortList, a free weekly launched in September, is expected to record a circulation of more than 460,000.
That's far in excess of the weekly Nuts and the monthly FHM, both of which are due to report falls. Zoo is predicted to be down too.
But Mike Soutar, the man behind ShortList, hopes that the ABCs will be the first validation of his backers' theory that a free title could provide a vehicle for advertisers to reach the elusive, young, upmarket, male reader.
The question, of course, is whether giveaway copies are as valuable to advertisers as paid-fors. Soutar, naturally enough, thinks they are, pointing to survey that found 86% of his readers are male; 82% are ABC1; and the average age is 30.
We don't know much about the provenance of the survey yet. But those figures look surprisingly positive.
UPDATE 4pm:: The survey was carried out by Human Capital, a media strategy and research company, which ran an online survey on the ShortList site over a four-week period in December/January. There were 854 fully completely responses.
