Overview of the magazine industry
The magazine industry is one of the world’s largest corporations in the media institution; with having 3,200 different consumer titles, 1.4 billion magazines sold each year, advertisers spending £745 million in magazines, consumers annually spending £2 billion on magazines and statistically 85% of our population reading magazines. One of the reasons for this is because a lot of magazine companies have a crossmedia, multi-platform presence; advertising their work in other media forms, i.e. on t-shirts, on posters, in shops and so on – this facilitates to an increase in advertising which therefore creates a wider audience and so this all contributes to an enhanced population in their magazine industry; but also amplifies the profits made within the sale revenue.
Within the 2008 sale revenue in the newsagent, the statistics portray and confirm that the largest magazine publisher is Bauer Publishing, by taking up 25% of the revenue. This is followed by IPC media with 20%, then BBC with 7.8% and then the National magazine company with 7.3%.
Following on to the UK Music Press – it is an institution in which is made up of various sub-businesses in order to fulfil their main aim of publicising the music industry; these sub-businesses are; large corporations, small independent companies and independent magazines that are published by small groups of people. The magazines in which belong to a large corporation have an extensive multi-platform presence, for instance; The Bauer Media Group is the owner of Q and Kerrang, on top of having part ownership of The Box with Channel 4 another example is the IPC Media in which is owned by the world’s second largest media business, Time Warner; the IPC Media in fact also owns the NME music magazine.
Cross Media can either be a media property, media service, media story or media experience that is spread across a media platform by using a range of different media forms; it is essential for them to incorporate more interest within their products as it will enhance the overall profit. Cross media has a multiple range of different benefits that can be handed to the publisher, the advertiser and/or the fans. The benefits in which are given to the publisher are that they would achieve more publicity – this is because their work is publicised in a lot of different forms and so this will essentially help with increasing their sale revenue. The benefits in which are supplied to the advertiser are for example, if the magazine company is using a variety of different media forms in order to publicise their magazine to attract a wider/larger audience, the advertiser will also receive more publicity alongside the magazine company and so resulting in their work gaining more interest. Lastly, the benefits in which the fans will gain are that they would be satisfied with the magazine in which they are interested and how it is publicising their work in different media forms; this means that the fans are more likely to buy more of the merchandise that is of their interest.