Vital Statistics

The Vital Statistics

There are more than 8000 titles published in Britain which can be categorised as follows:

1.    consumer (general and specialist) sold in newsagents and available online;

2.     business / trade / professional / B2B - for people at work;

3.     customer magazines that organisations to give to their customers as a form of marketing;

4.     staff magazines to inform staff about their company

5.     newspaper supplements - come free as part of daily or Sunday paper;

6.     part works - a set number of issues builds up into an 'encyclopaedia' on a specific topic;

7.     academic journals - for university-level discussion of all sorts of arcane topics.

Consumer magazines make up the bulk of the titles for sale in newsagents.
They may be general titles that aim to entertain and inform (such as Loaded, Elle, Radio Times)
or consumer specialist titles aimed at a specific interest or hobby (Car, Total Film, Gardeners’ World).

The biggest consumer magazine publishers (by 2008 sales revenue in newsagents):

Update: Immediate Media bought out BBC Magazines in October 2011

Today in the UK:

•          There are over 3,200 different consumer titles (in 1980 there were only 1,383)

•          1.4 billion magazines are sold each year (it was 2.1 billion in 1970 and 1.2 billion in 1992)

•          85% of the population reads a magazine

•          Advertisers spent £745 million in magazines (in 2008)

•          Consumers spend £2 billion on magazines annually

•          An average of 500 new magazines have been launched every year in the past decade

•          Only 3 in 10 titles survive for more than 4 years

Sources:           www.magforum.com,
                        www.ipcadvertising .com