Industrial Context: Magazine Industry

UK Magazines:

UK magazines are mainly based in London, though some publishing groups, such as Furture in Bath and DC Thompson in Dundee, are based in other cities. The Periodical Publishers Association represents 400 publishers operating in Britain, accounting for 2,300 consumer, business, and professional magazines - 80% of the UK magazine market by turnover. There are 8,000 titles published in Britain and they can be categorised in these sectors:

1. Consumer (general and specialist) sold in newsagents.
2. Business/Trade/Professional/B2B - for people at work.
3. Cosumer Publishing/Contract Publishing/Custom - produced by publishing agencies for organisations to give to their customers as a form of marketing.
4. Staff Magazines - produced by a company's internal communications team or a publishing agency to inform staff about their company.
5. Newspaper Supplements are free with a daily or Sunday paper.
6. Part Works - a set number of issues builds up into an 'encyclopedia' on a specific topic.
7. Academic Journals - for university-level discussion of all sorts of arcane topics.

Consumer Magazines:

Consumer magazines make up the bulk of the titles for sale in Britain's newsagents. They may be general titles that aim to entertain and inform (such as GQ, Elle, Radio Times) or consumer specialist titles aimed at a specific interest or hobby (Car, Total Film, Gardeners' World). THere are about 2,800 UK consumer magazines.

The biggest consumer magazine publishers (by newsagent sales revenue):

• Bauer (German group that took over the 2nd largest group, Emap, in 2008): 26%
• IPC (Time Warner): 20%
• Burda (another German group that acquired Immediate Media, publisher of Radio Times, in a deal worth £260 million in 2017): 8%
• National Magazines (Hearst): 7%

Most UK magazines for consumers - 90% - are sold by newsagents or supermarkets. Smiths News, owned by Connect Group, is the biggest distributor with a 55% share of the UK market. It delivers 35 million newspapers and 11 million magazines to 30,000 retailers each week. The UK is more reliant on newsagent sales than the US and continental European countries, where subscriptions dominate.

Total sales of such magazines have been falling since 1960 (with far fewer titles) as the role of magazines and newspapers as the main purveyor of information and entertainment was usurped by television. Firgures from the Advertising Association put total sales at 2,100 million in 1992. However, there was a rise to 1,399 million copies in 2004 before dropping back to 1,000 million by 2017. Overall, sales are falling at 5% a year.

Launches in the past ten years have numbered 421-02 annually, according to WHSmith.