The Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) has released its semiannual FAS-FAX report on U.S. consumer magazines, covering July to December 2011.
The champion among subscriptions: AARP [American Association of Retired People], The Magazine, with 22.4 million subscribers, closely followed by AARP: The Bulletin, with 22.2 million. But, these publications are benefits of AARP membership, with its 50+ demographic. Only two other titles in the list are membership-based, being AAA Living and American Legion Magazine.
Excluding those, Better Homes and Gardens tops the list, with 22.2 million subscribers—down just a hair from 2010. BHG (a Meredith title) claims a monthly readership of 38.33 million readers, 30.28 million of whom are women.
There is likely very little crossover in demographics between BHG and #4 on the list—Game Informer, covering the interactive gaming market. Publisher Sunrise Publications offers no insight into its demographics (which presumably reflects those of gamers, being largely male and under 30).
10% downtick at newsstands
Still, single-copy sales were down 9.96% during the period, which Media Life called the “steepest slide in the last four reporting periods.” Single-copy sales across 408 consumer titles dropped from 32,118,948 in the latter half of 2011 to 28,919,153. They were down 9.15% during the first half of 2011, and down down 7.27% latter 2010.
Ad pages were down in 2011 as well, and consumers likely cut back on impulse buys, particularly of celebrity titles like OK!. Newsstand sales of OK! plummeted 27.5%. Women’s titles suffered as well, with Oprah Winfrey’s O down 32%.
Still, publishers are pushing valiantly into the digital space—a good move: According researchers GfK MRI, almost three-quarters (71%) of tablet owners say they are interested in reading magazines on their devices. Publishers are not surrendering on the newsstands, either. Yesterday marked the launch of a revamped Ladies’ Home Journal, (12th among paid subscriberships in latter 2011, absent from the top 25 in newsstand sales). In addition to a new look and logo, the new content creation model invites readers for a stipend to submit personal growth stories—ostensibly for a more engaged readership.
Upfront TV: “Sons of Anarchy” Renewed | NBC Dooms “The Firm” | 20/20 Dominates 18-49
- Before Season 5 even airs, FX has renewed its biker drama “Sons of Anarchy” for a sixth season, reports TVByTheNumbers, and creator Kurt Sutter has been signed to a new three-year deal. “Sons of Anarchy” is expected to return in October of this year. The Season 4 premiere, which aired September 6 of 2011, was the most-watched program in FX history, with 6.5 million viewers.
- NBC has “effectively cancelled” the lawyer-in-trouble drama “The Firm,” reports Broadcasting & Cable. NBC has moved the series to the Saturdays 9 p.m. slot to “burn off” its remaining original episodes. “The Firm” was on Thursdays at 10 p.m. (a slot held for more than a decade by “E.R.”). NBC will premiere its new drama “Awake” beginning March 1, with repeats of “Grimm” running in the slot until then. “The Firm” drew a meager 0.8 rating with adults 18-49 in last Thursday’s airing.
- ABC finished #1 on Friday among adults 18-49; the network crowed in a press release that “it was the Net’s 4th straight Friday to deliver the #1 position against its network rivals.” ABC’s 20/20 took the night’s #1 position among that key young-adult demographic. Perhaps it was the subject matter: 20/20 featured an in-depth look at marriage and divorce, Hollywood style.
- More signs of struggle at the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN); “The Rosie Show” shed more staffers last week, to a total of 30 employees and contractors, and has moved taping to a smaller studio. As Crain’s Chicago Business describes, host O’Donnell is trying to “find the right formula to boost ratings,” which now average only 200,000 viewers, as opposed to its premier at 500,000. The show has done away with some fun-based elements like a game show segment, in favor of one-on-one interviews.
Upfront Digital: Sports Piracy | Google Underwhelms Subcommittee | Honda Wins with Bueller
- Sports piracy brings harsh justice, and from on high. The LA Times reports that federal authorities, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have “blitzed” 16 websites illegally streaming sports events, and have brought criminal charges against the owner of nine of them. Police arrested Yonjo Quiroa, 28, of Comstock Park, Mich., and charged him with criminal copyright infringement. Quiroa live-streamed NFL, NBL, NHL and World Wrestling Federation events.
- Google’s talks with House lawmakers over privacy concerns “don’t seem to be going well at all,” reports AllThingsD. Two high-ranking Google officials met with members of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Wednesday, to discuss a new policy that unifies 60 Google services under a single user name. “[Google] danced around actual details, and instead spoke in generalities, highlighting their efforts to ‘enhance the user experience’,” said Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas. The proposed privacy changes would grant Google greater license to share user account information between services, outside of the users’ control.
- More grist for the Apple iOS versus Android mill: comScore reported that the Google Android platform took 47.3% share of the smart-phone platform market in December, versus Apple iOS at 29.6%. comScore believes Android’s popularity is the driving force behind Samsung’s 25.3% smart phone market share. That compared to That compared to Apple’s 12.4% share. Apple gained slightly Q3 to Q4, with a 2.2% bump while Samsung held steady.
- Honda proved cross-media value this week. As AdAge Digital reports, Honda’s Ferris Bueller-themed Super Bowl spot (one of the many leaked beforehand) collected 4.4 million views last week, on outlets led by YouTube. The company Visible Measures charted the top 10 ad views, most of them Super Bowl leaks. Second at 3.09 million views was Volkswagen’s “The Bark Side” ad, in which a bunch of dogs bark the Darth Vader theme from “Star Wars.”
- The Twitter Peek has died, reports Engadget. This toy-like Twitter-and-email-only handset, released by Peek in 2009, never caught fire. Its value proposition was $299 for a bare-bones device with lifelong mobile service. But the devices ceased to work on Monday, complained users. Peek CEO Amol Sarva, confirmed the death, and has no plans to replace the devices: Peek will stick to aftermarket software.
Sony Halts Production on Google TV Models: Low-Cost Ad Reach Still Elusive
Sony has halted production on its Internet TV with built-in Google TV platform. Frost & Sullivan Principal Analyst Dan Rayburn broke the story late yesterday on his streamingmedia.com blog. While Sony has made no such announcement, Rayburn reached out to Sony stores and Sony’s sales numbers. He did so after observing the Sony models disappearing from online sales channels like Amazon.com, where only 13 of the TVs were available and from third-party resellers—not from Sony.
Google introduced the platform in May of 2010, at its annual Google I/O developer conference, with the tagline “TV MEETS WEB. WEB MEETS TV.” As TechCrunch described, “The implications are pretty clear what Google is going for. That is, the 4 billion TV users worldwide. Or rather, advertising to the 4 billion TV users worldwide.” A commentator on the TechCrunch site grumbled “Hopefully ad agencies will start to realize that Google is just waiting to flip the switch and cut them out. But somehow I doubt it.” Google CEO Larry Page boldly predicted that before the summer of 2012, the majority of production televisions would have the Google TV platform embedded. But thusfar, and aside from Sony’s models, competitors LG, Samsung and Vizio have announced only five such models.
Sony has not abandoned the Google TV platform; it just released a Blu-ray Disc player with Google TV embedded, and at a modest $199. And the models that LG, Samsung and Vizio have announced are all 47-inch or more. Rayburn observes that competition from those makers is likely keeping Google TV down—they are competing with their own connected TV platforms, “And it’s clear they see the Google TV platform as a threat.”
At the time of Google TV’s release, Bloomberg BusinessWeek observed advertisers giving it a “warm reception.” As BusinessWeek did the math, an online video ad through the platform would cost $30 per $1,000 viewings and enjoy precise viewing analytics and have interactive capability; a TV viewer could “click to phone” or place an order then and there, without leaving the TV screen.
But, with competitive platforms from TV makers, Apple, and cable companies including Comcast, interactive TV is still feeling its way, and Google TV is showing no signs of becoming the standard the company predicted it would be.
Harsh reality for “Reality Weekly,” “OK!”
No official numbers yet, but industry buzz is that Reality Weekly, the new American Media Inc. (AMI), is struggling. Sources have told WWD that the first issue, shipped the last week of December, sold just over 100,000 copies, despite delivering 500,000 copies to newsstands. Subsequent issues have sold less.
Reality Weekly has made both safe and risky decisions. It priced itself at a consumer-friendly $1.79, and its online ads in other AMI properties ask “Seriously, where else are you going to have this much fun for just $1.79?” But its first issue featured Kim Kardashian on the cover, in defiance of “Kardashian Krash,” an ennui towards the celebrity sisters that has killed newsstand sales. Secondly, it named Omarosa O. Manigault its West Coast editor, and declared her in a press release to be “The first star of reality TV.” Manigault’s credentials and work ethic have always been sketchy; she appeared on the first season of Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice,” declaring herself a former Clinton White House appointee. In reality, she held a low-level job from which she was fired. Since then, she has appeared on more than 20 reality shows, including "Surreal Life,” "Fear Factor" and "Girls Behaving Badly," and invariably generating negative buzz from viewers.
Reality Weekly has a cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) of $45, and Issue 1 had 14 pages of print ads. Its current issue featurs a "Biggest Loser" contestant sharing weight-loss tips and death threats toward "The Bachelor" contestant Ben Flajnik. Both "Loser" and "Bachelor" have seen declining ratings in their current seasons.
American Media owns both the Star and the National Enquirer tabloids, and another celebrity weekly magazine, OK!, which also appears to be struggling. WWD reports that OK! has averaged less than 200,000 in newsstand sales per week in January 2012, far down from its halcyon days of .5 million copies in newsstand sales.
American Idol Debut Plunges 27% YoY
A surprisingly weak Tuesday premiere of American Idol on Fox. Its season 11 debut averaged a 7.2 rating of adults 18-49 during its two-hour time slot, reports Media Life. That is down a full 27% from its Season 10 premiere, which averaged a 9.7.
Viewer ennui is the likely cause. Historically, even the most beloved TV offerings (ER, M*A*S*H, All in the Family, Happy Days, Gunsmoke) struggle to survive longer than 10 seasons. Also true, Idol has relied upon changes among its judges to refresh ratings, but the panel (Randy Jackson, Steven Tyler, Jennifer Lopez) has remained the same and perhaps lost its novelty. Finally, competitive offerings like NBC’s The Voice are glutting the market for singing competitions.
Still, Idol took the lion’s share of viewers, while most other programming declined. Chief among the losers was NBC. Whitney (8pm) dropped 20% among adults 18-49, and Are You There, Chelsea? lost 22% from its premiere the week before, for a 1.8 rating.
Gannett Scales Back Metromix In New York: Shades of AOL Patch
Gannett is paring back its online offering New York Metromix, perhaps the most significant of its 65 localized Metromix editions. Local business site Capital New York broke the story yesterday, and called it a “shuttering.” But a Gannett spokeswoman told Capital New York that “Some Metromix employees in editorial, advertising sales,administration and …operations” were eliminated, and that New York Metromix was “evaluating its options” for moving forward.
It appears likely that Metromix will return to its earlier model of aggregating content, but a New York Metromix staffer expressed his doubts that “There’s no way they’re keeping it up.”
Gannett Tribune Company formed a joint venture to acquire Metromix in 2007, when it was local only to Chicago but had enjoyed a healthy 10-year run. Users were typically urban and between 21 and 34. Metromix is currently live in 65 cities, including Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Advertisers include local businesses, like Shanghai Restaurant in San Francisco, but heavy-hitters like Chase Sapphire, ZipCar.
No word yet on the fate of the remaining 64 operations. But, going ultra-local appears to be a young and troublesome model. The Metromix trouble comes just a few months after AOL began scaling back its own local-advertising and locally-generated online offering, Patch. Forbes reported in October 2011 that Patch.com was “burning off $40 million per quarter,” after AOL acquired the outlet in 2009. Patch’s more than 800 editors were advised that their budgets for freelancers would be slashed, articles would be republished across the country (despite the ultra-local focus), and editors were encouraged to dedicate their time to pulling in ad revenue.
Editor & Publisher Launching “2020 Vision” of Newspaper Business
Beginning in February, Editor & Publisher magazine will begin “deconstruct[ing] the current newspaper business model and rebuild[ing] it from the ground up,” in a series it calls 2020 Vision.
E&P columnist and industry analyst Alan Mutter predicted that 2011 would mark “the lowest point yet” for newspaper ad revenue. Mutter was analyzing data from the Newspaper Association of America, and predicted that 2011 revenues would be $24 billion, down from the record high $49.4 billion in 2005. Q4 2011 results are still drifting in, but for Q1 through Q3, classified ads fell 12.9%,retail by 8.8%, and national advertising dropped 11%.
In an analysis of data compiled by the Newspaper Association of America, E&P columnist and industry consultant Alan Mutter predicted that 2011 would mark the lowest point yet for newspaper ad revenue — a mere $24 billion in comparison to the record high of $49.4 billion in 2005. Though Mutter has drawn negative comments from our readers for his critique of the industry, the numbers from the NAA can’t be ignored. In the first nine months of 2011, classified advertising fell 12.9 percent, retail dropped 8.8 percent, and national advertising fell 11 percent.
E&P observes that, however important a digital strategy appears to be, it has yet to fulfill its potential in newspaper revenue. “Sure, digital advertising climbed 8.3%, but digital still contributes only 14.3% to overall publisher revenue.
E&P pledges to point a critical eye at every aspectof newspaper publishing, starting with content “always the bread and butter” in February; then moving on to distribution, technology, budget allocation and management.
The Bachelor Maintains Sex Appeal On ABC, Just Barely
ABC’s The Bachelor “continues to slip” says The Hollywood Reporter, barely edging out repeats on CBS. Still, ABC led the night among adults 18-49, and with 8 million viewers, took a 2.2 rating. Hollywood Reporter has described bachelor contestant Ben Flajnik as a “Sensitive Sonoma winemaker,” while the ‘Net is abuzz with complaints that he is bland. (Flajnik was a losing contestant on the 2011 season of The Bachelorette.)
Still, ABC appears to have selected a cast of female contestants based largely on their ability to generate buzz, among them, a germophobe named Emily, a perpetual weeper named Jenna, and the reality-TV-standard overconfident “I can’t lose” contestant, named Courtney. Still, the shenanigans are barely working for ABC. CBS took second place with a repeat of 2 Broke Girls pulling in Monday’s highest score among adults 18-49 with a 2.4 rating; and CBS averaged a 2.1 rating in that demographic, and a total of 7 million viewers. Elsewhere, Who’s Still Standing on NBC took a 1.6 rating in the 18-49 demo, and House repeats took 1.1 with 3.2 million viewers.
73% Say NYT Not Worth $2.50
Poll Position, an online polling resource headed largely by former CNN execs, has bad news for the New York Times. Fully 73% of Americans the company polled answered “No” to the question “Is any daily newspaper worth a newsstand purchase price of $2.50?” That is the cover price of the New York Times, which it raised by 50 cents earlier this week. Sixteen percent of those polled answered “yes,” while 11 percent have no opinion. Poll Position conducted a telephone survey of 1,094 registered voters on January 3 (Tuesday).
Interestingly, the perpetually-logged-on 18-29 demographic was more likely than older people to value a print paper at $2.50. Among 18-29 year olds, 65% voted no, and 29% yes. The "no" votes leapt to 73% among 30-44 year olds, and "yeses" dropped to 17%; 45-64 year olds – 78% no, 11% yes; 65+ year olds – 72% no, 11% yes. And along political lines, Democrats voted 66% no, 24% yes, and Republicans 75% no, 17% yes.