Print Magazine Sales and Subscriptions still Sinking

A recent article in Campaign records Condé Nast suffering biggest audience decline as magazine market drops 5.6% year-on-year. The biggest casualty was Condé’s ’Glamour’ title which accounted for a 26% decline on its own.

Editors are hoping to revive the title by re-launching it in a larger more luxurious format, we will see if that does the trick. It’s not been long since we had reports that Condé Nast was in rude health and actually bucking the overall downward decline - and while titles like Vogue still seem to be somewhat impervious, others are evidently quite a bit less so.

It would seem that topical news titles are generally bucking the trend - titles like Private Eye, The Spectator and The Economist seem to be in high demand as we all try to make sense of the rapidly changing world around us. From most media owners’ standpoint though, it has long been evident that traditional revenue models were at risk, and none more so than conventional magazine sales and subscriptions.

If you’ve not yet kick-started a diversification programme, now is most definitely the time. Media owners need to look to Big Data, Events and Member Services to bolster dwindling revenues in other areas. It is now more important than ever what sort of business platform you are running on, how flexible it is, and how many revenue streams it can cater for!...