Media Planning: Magazine Circulation Falls by 50%

A traditional publication itself (though read by this writer online, naturally), WWD reports that magazine circulation has fallen by alarming rates over the past year. We’ve reported on this trend before, and we’re not the only ones by far, but the WWD article paints a more complete picture of which magazines are struggling, which are rebounding, and which are very near total failure. Plus, the article really gets down to the nitty gritty of the numbers, analyzing newsstand sales vs. subscriptions, month-by-month sales, sales by vertical, etc. Here’s a snippet:

That Men’s Vogue’s newsstand is down 39.1 percent, for example, even as it’s raising its rate base to 400,000, can be explained several ways: first, that it suffers from an apples-and-oranges comparison between five issues published in the first half of 2008 and three in the first half of 2007; second, and more significantly, that it’s growing its audience the expensive way, through subscriptions, and not wowing on the newsstand.

Also, unsurprisingly, the article points out that magazines are trying to raise their subscription bases online as a cheaper way to add subscribers than direct mail. Ironically, the WWD article we’re reporting on here requires a subscription to read, but is that honestly the way publishers should be going? The walled-garden strategy proved to be a giant failure many months, if not years ago. And when you compare these stats about tumbling magazine circulation with the piece Piers posted earlier about how blogs are getting double the page views of traditional publications, perhaps magazines should be taking a different approach to things.

WWD: Magazine Circulation Falls in Half (subscription req)