Magazine Newsstand Sales Slip 10%
- by Erik Sass @eriksass1, February 8, 2010
The latest round of bad circulation news follows previous newsstand declines of about 11% in the second half of 2008 versus 2007, and the recent announcement from the Publishers Information Bureau that magazine ad pages fell 25.6% in 2009 versus 2008.
Out of 115 leading consumer magazines included in the MediaPost analysis of ABC data, 90 (78%) saw newsstand sales decline between the second half of 2008 and the second half of 2009. Of these, 58 (50% of the total) experienced newsstand declines of over 10%, and 26 (23%) experienced declines of 20% or more.
Some of the biggest losers, in percentage terms, were Newsweek , where newsstand sales tumbled 42% to 62,257; Time, down 35% to 89,592; Road & Track, down 34% to 60,594; Good Housekeeping, down 31% to 395,2889; Redbook, down 30% to 126,358; Maxim, down 28% to 293,943; Ebony, down 28% to 148,600; and Car and Driver, down 24% to 76,331.
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In paid subscriptions, on the other hand, the 115 magazines surveyed in this analysis showed no significant change, with total paid subs for the group slipping less than 1%, from 140,515,704 to 139,716,862.
However, magazines did cut their "verified" subscriptions -- free or discounted copies, sometimes sponsored by third parties -- 24% from 7,340,569 to 5,589,191. As a result, total subscriptions (including paid and verified) sank 3% from 147,856,273 to 143,440,905.
Looking to long-term trends, in 2009 an earlier MediaPost analysis showed that magazine newsstand sales for 100 leading consumer magazine titles -- including most of those in the current analysis -- declined steadily from 2002-2009, falling from 29.3 million in the six-month period ending June 2002 to just under 19.6 million for the same period in June 2009, a 33% drop.
