Enlarge imageBy Adam Pasick, UK media correspondent
LONDON (Reuters) - Two new weekly men’s magazines are stealing readers from monthly counterparts like FHM, Maxim and Loaded by sticking to the "lad mag" formula of gadgets, sport and scantily clad girls.
Nuts, published by Time Warner’s IPC Media, is selling 290,000 copies per week according to data released by the Audit Bureau of Circulation on Thursday. Zoo, published by Emap, is selling 200,000 copies per week.
Together, they represent sales of nearly 2 million issues a month, roughly doubling the volume of the men’s magazine category. The weeklies 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 men’s 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 circulation numbers are used to set advertising rates and any decline in readership can have a large effect on profitability.
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.
"The weeklies are the most successful launch since Loaded and Maxim almost 10 years ago," said Maxim Group Publishing Director Bruce Sandell. "One of the positive things for all the men’s magazines is that they can bring in younger readers."
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. That suggests that the weeklies are bringing new readers to the newsstand, and that many readers are buying more than one magazine.
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 H Bauer’s Cut 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.
