Between the covers: how the British fell out of love with magazines

Another gap is about to appear on your newsagent’s shelf. This week Marie Claire announced the closure of its UK print edition, adding to an expanding list of high-profile titles from NME to FHM that have succumbed to the digital revolution.

The British love affair with consumer magazines has become increasingly tepid since the arrival of online competitors such as YouTube and Facebook, compounded by the new leisure-time lures of Netflix and Amazon.

Marie Claire is the latest title to succumb, 31 years after its launch as “the thinking woman’s magazine”. It mixed serious features with fashion and beauty as it took a pioneering stance on topical women’s issues, which helped it garner four Amnesty Media Awards, including one for a report on rape as a weapon of war in the Congo. Liz Jones, the editor from 1999 to 2001, was fired after speaking out against being forced to use bulimic models. But as it blazed an editorial trail, circulation fell from a peak of more than 450,000 in the mid-90s to 120,000 now.

The magazine business is in trouble, and its problems are summed up by the current top 10 chart of consumer titles that readers buy or subscribe to. In the first half of this year the total circulation of that top 10 was 4.7m – half the 9.4m recorded in the first six months of 2001.

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Total annual UK consumer magazine sales have fared even worse, plummeting by 60% from just over 1.2bn in 2005 to 481m last year, according to the research firm Enders Analysis.

Other titles that have struggled in the last decade include OK!, once the king of celebrity gossip magazines, which has seen sales fall by almost 80% to 122,000 copies.

Over the same period Cosmopolitan’s popularity dropped 60%, and the circulation of Heat magazine slumped by three-quarters.

The roll call of well-known print casualties in recent years includes the lads’ mags generation of FHM, Loaded, Maxim, Nuts and Zoo; female-focused titles such as More!, Look, Instyle, celebrity gossip magazine Now, She magazine and Reveal.

Last year, NME stopped printing after 66 years and free magazine Shortlist, the biggest men’s magazine in the UK by circulation, also closed down.

And experts believe it is only going to get worse. “There is a crisis in the industry,” says Douglas McCabe, the chief executive of Enders Analysis. “Given how much circulation has fallen there really haven’t been as many outright closures as you’d think. Some publishers are just hanging on. We would expect to see more closures in the next five years than the previous five.”

He adds: “There is social media, Instagram, Mail Online. So why go out and buy a magazine, even a strong brand, when you can get updates every second? And that’s without the wider fight for consumers’ attention from services such as YouTube and even Netflix.”

There are some bright spots, however, where online offerings have failed to offer a compelling alternative. TV listing magazines including TV Choice, the nation’s biggest-selling title at 1.1m per issue, What’s on TV, Take a Break and Radio Times remain top-selling staples.

“In terms of TV listings their resilience is because there still isn’t anything out there online that is better,” says McCabe.

There are others, he says, that are still thriving: “Titles that are being invested in, that have a confidence and attitude like weekly news brands the Economist, Private Eye and the Week, have also bucked the trend.”

Where publishers sell their titles matters too. Supermarkets are the most important channel for sales of consumer magazines. The top five grocers account for more than 40% of total magazine retail sales in the UK, while the proportion sold through independent news agents has slipped to just 19%.

Against the bleak sales backdrop the publishers are increasingly focusing on using a household brand built up over decades to seek profitability beyond print. Marie Claire, for instance, will continue online and its owner says the title is simply following the readers.

“It is very similar to the route we took with NME,” says Marcus Rich, the chief executive of Marie Claire’s UK publisher, TI Media. “There are just certain reader demographics that have moved to smartphones, or the web, and it makes sense to move digital-first. It was a logical evolution as a lot of focus was spent on trying to sustain a print model; now we can focus online.”

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The biggest challenge with chasing readers online is fighting the stranglehold the Silicon Valley giants have on eyeballs – and the advertising pounds that follow them.

By 2021, Google (including YouTube), Facebook (including Instagram), Twitter and Snapchat will rake in almost £12bn in digital ad revenues in the UK, equal to 70% of the total digital market, according to research by eMarketer. By comparison, digital ad spend on consumer magazine brands will be just £130m this year.

As print advertising in consumer magazines dries up – by the end of this year it will have more than halved from £512m in 2010 to £220m – publishers are branching out into areas such as e-commerce and events.

The stockmarket-listed publisher Future, which has a portfolio of 100 publishing brands from the gadget magazine T3 to the rock title Metal Hammer, has bucked the malaise and seen its market value hit a record high of £1bn.

However, the chief executive, Zillah Byng-Thorne, says just one-third of its more than £200m in annual revenue now comes from traditional print advertising or magazine sales. The company now makes tens of millions of pounds from the commission it earns from sales of products to readers who make a purchase from a partner – such as Amazon or John Lewis – after reading a product review on one of its sites.

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At the tough end of the consumer magazine market, dual online and print strategies are also starting to show real promise. Earlier this year the Face, the style magazine that defined the 80s and 90s, made a comeback after 15 years with a web strategy backed by a quarterly magazine. And two years after the UK’s then 10th bestselling magazine, Glamour, cut its print run to just twice a year and went digital-first, it is now on track to be back in profit for 2019.

But for many other titles, as Marie Claire has just shown, the ability to stay in print in any form is an ongoing struggle.