Over view of the magazine industry

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.     Costumer magazines that organisations 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 of number of issues builds up into an ‘encyclopaedia’ on a specific topic;

7.     Academic journals – for university-level discussion on all sorts of arcane topics.

The biggest consumer magazine publishers in Britain (2008) the top two are Bauer and IPC, both put together have 45% of the market.

Today in the UK there are more than 3200 different consumer titles, and 85% of the population reads a magazines leading to the staggering amount of more than 1.4 billion magazines sold each year with £2 billion pounds spent annually. With an average of 500 new titles coming out each year only 3 in 10 titles will make it past 4 years despite the fact that advertisers spend £745 million in magazines.