Magazine industry overview

Magazine industry overview In the UK and Ireland magazines have a rather large presence, for my coursework I have looked at primarily music magazines as I have been tasked to create one but in this I shall be looking at both music and non-music magazines in order to obtain an insight into what the consumers are buying and what content is commonplace in order to inform the structure of my own magazine.

Firstly the top 10 magazines are comprised of)from 1st to 10th): TV choice, What’s on TV, Take a break, Slimming world, Radio times, Glamour, Closer, Chat, Woman’s weekly and New! The top ten show me that the main audience for modern magazines is women (middle aged) and also middle aged men (usually in a relationship), this can be found out via inspection of top 3 as it is revealed that they intent to appeal to an audience of both sexes and the content within those can be perceived as gender neutral. The top 2 are of most interest as their sales figures are each respectively nearly double that of Take a break magazine, which is understandable as it is intended for a mainly female audience.

Upon inspection of the top 10 music magazines it is brought to light that although magazines which focus on a single genre or music in its entirety comprise most of the list, those which cover the whole media industry or those which are multi genre have a huge presence in the top 5, this informs me that my product needs to go multi genre or cover more than just music to be successful and reach a wider audience.

When it comes to advertising in a magazine the costs vary depending on the popularity of the magazine and the size of advert the advertiser wants to be featured, the setup cost has the most variance ranging from about $500 to $397,800.The average cost of placing an advert is about $250,000 and that depends on location and size, to continue an ad campaign can cost considerably more. The placement of an ad can sometimes be a dumb idea as sometimes a magazine which panders to more than your intended audience can leave you not making a return on your investment.