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Magazine Advertising Plunge Worsens in Q2, Pages Slide 30%

Ad pages for consumer magazines slipped 29.5% in the second quarter of 2009 from Q2 2008, a steeper slide than Q1 2009, when ad pages fell 26%.

For the first half, ad pages were down 27.9%.

All categories tracked by the Publishers Information Bureau were down by double digits, with automotive, financial, insurance and real estate being hit the hardest, writes Media Life. Automotive fell 47.8%, while financial was down 48.8%. Toiletries and cosmetics performed the best, down 14.1%.

Total rate-card reported spending for the second quarter was down 22%, while total spending for the first half was down 21.1%.

The trend of declining ad pages has been significant over the past year: in Q2 of 2008, ad pages were down 8.2%, followed by a drop of 13% in Q3, 17% in Q4 and 26% in Q1 09, the Wall Street Journal points out.

The magazines that had the steepest decline in ad pages include Country Home, which saw ad pages fall 80.7%, followed by Conde Nast Portfolio (now shuttered), which lost 69.1% of ad pages, and Blender (also shuttered), which saw ad pages fall 82.2%.

People Style Watch saw ad pages leap 33.1%, while Country Weekly’s pages grew 33% and Muscle & Fitness saw a 13.1% gain, according to Folio.

Magazines 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.

As consumers continue to jump ship and head online, circulation spending will suffer an 8.3% drop in 2009, and will be down to $8.4 billion in 2013, from $9.7 billion last year.