A total of 187 new American and Canadian magazines have launched so far this year, but a much larger number - 279 titles - have shuttered operations, a trend which has accelerated in Q209, according to MediaFinder.com.
Regional Interest magazines, which traditionally comprise a large percentage of new and closing magazines, took a big nosedive in the first half of 2009, with 27 titles...
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Music magazine Vibe is closing, effective immediately, leaving just two major music magazines focusing on hip-hop and R&B, XXL and The Source.
Steve Aaron, chief of Vibe Media Group, told staffers in a memo that the company had tried unsuccessfully to find new investors or to restructure the huge debt the small company has, reports The New York Times. Music magazine Blender likewise shuttered...
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Reader’s Digest magazine is reducing its coverage on celebrities and how-to features and boosting the number of inspirational, spiritual stories, in a move that is taking it away from years of attempting to appeal to the broadest possible audience to a focus on a more conservative readership, The New York Times writes.
The magazine will “focus on a market that’s ignored but is incredibly...
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The public’s lust for all things vampire has helped True Blood, HBO’s sophomore drama about a telepath and her blood-sucking friends, pull 3.7 million total viewers for its second-season premiere on Sunday.
That number was more than twice that of the series premiere last year, and was 51% higher than the show’s season-one ender, writes Media Life. When viewership from a second airing later...
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Magazines, which saw ad pages fall by 19.2% in Q1 09, will begin to see an improvement over the next five years, according to a new forecast from PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Print advertising will plunge 22.8% to $9.8 billion between 2008 and 2010, but will rise 14.3% to $11.2 billion by 2013, PricewaterhouseCooper’s new Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2009-2013 predicts (via Adweek). As...
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Mediamark Research & Intelligence has launched a new research product with Time Inc. and Starcom USA as inaugural subscribers. The product, AdMeasure, gives the average audience size for any magazine ad that takes up more than a third of a page, across nearly 650 consumer magazines tracked by the company.
Rather than focusing simply on a magazine’s total readership, AdMeasure claims to measure...
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Business magazines, including Forbes, Fortune and BusinessWeek are, like the rest of the magazine industry, struggling for ad pages.
Ad pages for Forbes were down 15% in the first quarter of the year, compared with the same quarter in 2008, but is doing far better than some of its competitors; ad pages declined far more steeply at Fortune (-26.3%) and BusinessWeek (-39.8%). Overall, consumer...
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The U.S. version of OK magazine lost $23.4 million last year and is expected to have lost close to $130 million by August, making it one of the most expensive magazine launches in publishing history.
In comparison, Conde Nast spent about $120 million on the launch of the now-defunct Portfolio, writes the New York Post.
Profits at Richard Desmond’s RCD1 Ltd., the holding company of Northern &...
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Total measured advertising expenditures in the first quarter of 2009 plunged 14.2% versus a year ago, to $30.18 billion, according to data released today by TNS Media Intelligence.
This follows a 9.2% decline in Q4 08, as the advertising recession accelerated in the new year, TNS says.
“The ad market declined significantly in the first quarter, overtaken by a collapsing economy which...
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The number of paid subscriptions to digital editions of magazines has leapt since 2007, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
In the first six months of 2007, 56 consumer magazines had fewer than 500,000 paid subscriptions to digital editions; by the end of last year, that number had nearly doubled, with 110 magazines reporting paid digital subscriptions of nearly 1 million, writes...
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