Maxim goes online only, who is next?
Newspapers and magazines in the US and UK have been falling quick and fast. In the men’s market Maxim, Arena and Blender in the US (once owned by Maxim’s publisher Dennis) have all gone in quick succession.
mWhat is most interesting about Maxim going is how quickly its circulation collapsed. Going from 234,183 copies in 2005, down to 140,000 in 2006 and 45,000 last year. Most of this was before the problems in the advertising market became pronounced. The advertising collapse is another problem for this struggling market to contend with.
What that means for title’s like IPC’s Loaded can’t be good. Loaded’s circulation stood at 95,371 copies in the second half of 2008, down 21% from 120,492 copies for the same period last year. Come August when the next magazine ABCs are due, one thing is clear: Loaded’s circulation will have fallen again. Is there an axe swinging above its printed head?
I could see Loaded joining Maxim as an online-only title. Time Inc, which owns Loaded publisher IPC Media, might be looking at charging, but it would be a hard sell to get people to pay for men’s content online if we look simply at where we currently stand. At the moment there seems little there that is compelling. So much of the content is available elsewhere – the advent of the iPhone, and the mobile internet generally, offers hot prospects for someone in the men’s market if they can get the model right.
The only men’s magazine that seems to prosper is Conde Nast’s GQ with a circulation of 130,094, a period-on-period rise of 0.1% – although it does that partly through sticking an attractive woman on 10 out of 12 covers (oh and it gives 10,000 copies away). FHM still has a sizeable 272,545, but suffers steep declines come each ABC time and once sold a staggering 700,000.
Maxim and Arena were killed, and others are being killed, by three things: a cultural shift away from traditional lad’s mags, the internet; and Short List. Shortlist boss Mike Soutar recently put his hand up and said that his free magazine had contributed to the closure of Arena, which was closed by Bauer Media in March. Fair claim, I’d say. Free content kills, it is certifiable deadly. The way Soutar put it was that Shortlist “had been a contributor” to Arena going out of business. Mike you’ve got another scalp for the wall.
I’ve written about this a lot in the past, the lack of a good men’s magazine and when it comes to online the problem is, I think, acute. I’m sure Maxim online will pull in an audience as it does already, but carving out a successful distinct persona is really hard when there is so little that separates one lad’s mag from another.
That said, I could for instance see Arena work more successfully online. The closure of Arena had been a long time coming. When it finally went it was selling only 29,374 copies. Why didn’t Bauer consider taking the title online only? That seems like a mistake to me. I would have thought that Arena, and its also defunct former sister magazine The Face for that matter (if ever there was a media brand that deserved a digital second life, that is one), must have commercial value online. Ciaran Norris has blogged more extensively on this and his post is definitely worth a read.
The last question is what does this all mean for Monkey? The Dennis digital-only men’s magazine, which it launched in November 2006, has since been used as the basis to launch a number of other digital only brands.
It has already added iGizmo and iMotor and in this Dennis is ahead of the curve. With the crash in advertising revenues these titles probably hold the future for the men’s market. How will Maxim sit alongside Monkey and will Dennis continue with two separate streams of digital investment in its men’s portfolio or will it combine the two to make something sharper and more distinct online that has a shot at being heard above the sea of sameness.
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