• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, February 3, 2010

February may not be the cruelest month, but it wasn't especially nice for consumer magazines either, with monthly titles showing a 7.2% drop, according to the Media Industry Newsletter.

On the other hand, that's a smaller decline than the double-digit losses which plagued the medium last year, and a slight improvement over January's 7.7% loss -- holding out hope that the magazine industry is finally approaching the bottom of its brutal downswing.

Altogether, 83 titles or 55% of the total 152 titles tracked by MIN saw ad pages decline in February 2010 compared to February 2009. Of these, 31 titles (20% of the total) experienced declines of less than 10%, 34 (22%) declined 10%-19.9%, and 25 (16%) declined 20% or more. While the number of titles experiencing losses increased from January -- when many magazines skipped an issue -- in percentage terms, the proportion is about the same: 55% in February versus 54% in January.

Furthermore, February's losses aren't as "top heavy" as January, when 15% of titles tracked declined less than 10%, 13% dropped 10%-19.9% and 26% fell more than 20%. The declines are spread more evenly across consumer magazines; in the past, a few dozen titles accounted for a much larger share of the overall decline.

If magazines can pull off a single-digit decline in the first quarter of 2010, as the MIN figures seem to suggest they might, it would be a vast improvement over the last year. In 2009, magazine publishing -- along with the rest of the traditional media -- was slammed by the worst recession in living memory.

According to the Publishers Information Bureau, total magazine ad pages (including weeklies and monthlies) fell 25.9% in the first quarter of 2009, 29.4% in the second, 26.6% in the third and 21.6% in the fourth quarter.

These losses compounded quarterly declines of 6.4%, 8.2%, 12.9% and 17.1% over the course of 2008. Overall, in the second half of the decade, total monthly and weekly ad pages fell 31% from 244,906 in 2006 to 169,218 in 2009.