ABC figures for 2nd Half of 2006

The ABC figures are out and they are a tale of woe for the men's magazines market. The women's magazines sector has done better and especially the relatively new trend for weeklies, eg Grazia. Stephen Brook has some comments in today's Media Guardian.

Stephen Brook suggests that one cause for the collapse in the men's titles could be the rise in digital subscriptions, he cites the new Dennis publication Monkey. But it could well be that the digital challenge is coming from the web as a whole not from quasi-magazines (ie from Google, YouTube and Facebook) and experiments such as Monkey are a rather small scale response. Hardly enough to cause a circulation collapse in their parent publisher's key titles. Dennis are also proposing to sell the men's magazine list, again Stephen Brook has the story, which may not be a vote of confidence in their digital future. We encourage magazine publishers to get their titles on to the web, just the way they are. There are signs that it is working for our publishers.