Source one - The Huffington Post 16/06/15
"The heyday of the magazine came in the early 20th century, when mega-publisher William Randolph Hearst launched Harper’s Bazaar, Good Housekeeping and National Geographic. Female-targeted Vogue and Vanity Fair followed, bringing fashion and women’s issues to the forefront of popular culture. Time was founded in 1923. The ’30s brought about aspirational magazines like Esquire and Fortune. Widely popular, topical publications directed at niche audiences rolled out in the ’40s and ’50s, including Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone. The ’60s and ’70s gave us the celebrity- and entertainment-focused magazines People and Cosmopolitan. In the following decades, magazines diversified, with The Face debuting in 1980, Entertainment Weekly in 1990, Wired in 1993. The late 1990s and 2000s brought about the digital revolution. But while newspapers have suffered steep declines amid the ride of the Internet, magazines are another story. Across the industry, subscriptions are down, but the picture is more complicated than the overarching numbers suggest. Magazines aren’t dying. About 190 new titles launched in 2014, up from 185 in 2013, according to database MediaFinder. While some legacy publications are struggling to keep their readers, magazines like Glamour, Parents and Better Homes and Gardens all reported increases in paid and verified circulation from 2013 to 2014."
Source 2 - Data from the National Readership Survey
Source 3 - Extract from Inside Magazine Publishing by David Stam and Andrew Scott
"While the magazine market is under attack from some powerful commercial organisations, it is important to be clear that the UK magazine market remains a major media sector and industry in its own right.
Combined research for Inside Magazine Publishing estimates that annual value of the magazine industry in 2012 to be £3.55 billion. This is split as follows:
- Consumers spend £1.8 billion on magazines at retail or via subscriptions.
- Print magazine advertising totals a futher £750 million.
- Content marketing agencies (the producers of customer magazines) contribute a furhter £1 billion.
- There are in excess of 2,400 consumer magazines."
Thanks to Hayley Sheard from Eduqas for compiling this information!