Enlarge image(In LONDON story headlined "UK weeklies Zoo and Nuts shake up ’lad mag’ market" please read in second paragraph ...Zoo, published by Emap ... and ...Nuts, published by Time Warner’s IPC Media...
A corrected version follows.)
By Adam Pasick, UK media correspondent
LONDON (Reuters) - Two new men’s magazines that offer up a weekly dose of scantily clad girls, gadgets and sport have stolen readers from their monthly counterparts FHM, Maxim and Loaded.
Zoo, published by Emap, is selling 200,000 copies per week according to data released by the Audit Bureau of Circulation on Thursday. Nuts, published by Time Warner’s IPC Media, is selling 290,000 copies per week.
Zoo and Nuts launched in January in a market already crowded with men’s titles, but apparently the appetite for models, football, gear and jokes has not yet been sated.
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The long-established monthly magazines all showed declines.
IPC’s Loaded lost 10.6 percent of its readers from December to June, for a total of 235,000 per issue, and Emap’s FHM was down 4.6 percent to 574,000, spurring fears that the publishers’ weekly titles may be cannibalising their sister monthly magazines.
The UK edition of Maxim, whose owner Dennis Publishing does not have a weekly men’s magazine, lost 6.7 percent of its readers, for a total of 227,000.
But although the monthlies took a hit, it wasn’t a zero-sum game, as the entire category grew 26.3 percent to 2.6 million issues in the year to June.
The battle for lad mag readership has already claimed one casualty this year. Dennis Publishing’s Jack, originally created by lad mag impresario James Brown and positioned as the thinking man’s men’s magazine, closed after it was crowded off the newsstand by Zoo and Nuts.
The two weeklies will face new competition from Bauer Publishing’s Cut, which was launched this month, and possibly from publisher Richard Desmond, whose company has registered a trademark for a magazine called KO!, presumably the mirror image of his women’s celebrity magazine OK!
Total UK magazine sales across all sectors rose 5.6 percent to 60.6 million in June compared with the year-ago period.
