The Business of Magazines

[tigerrouge]

Dragons' Den hero aims to breathe new fire into his dream

James Robinson, The Observer
Sunday March 16 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008...sandpublishing

Wanted: imaginative investor with spare cash to spend on glamorous magazine group with good prospects. Industry expertise preferable, but not essential. He won't say as much, but Huw Gwyther, the young publishing entrepreneur plucked from obscurity when he appeared on the first series of the BBC's Dragons' Den, is searching for a fresh influx of money to fund Wonderland, the aspirational title he founded four years ago. Such an advertisement will not be appearing in his magazine any time soon, but industry sources believe he is unlikely to turn away suitors should they beat a path to his door.

Gwyther is plotting an international expansion drive from his offices in London's fashionable Notting Hill, but establishing a presence in overseas markets is expensive and he concedes that more established rivals could provide him with invaluable resources and industry clout. After toiling for years to establish his company, an outright sale is not an option, but offloading a stake could prove too tempting to resist, particularly if a prospective buyer brings experience as well as money to the table.

Gwyther, 32 this year, was expecting a hostile reception when he asked the panel of hard-nosed entrepreneurs on the business show to invest in a glossy magazine, but he emerged from the dragons' lair armed with £175,000 from one of the judges – mobile-phone entrepreneur Peter Jones.

Jones took 40 per cent of the business, and Gwyther retained a controlling stake, building a burgeoning publishing empire that has won credibility in the fickle fashion world, which, in effect, bankrolls many lifestyle titles.

It is a fiercely competitive market, with established players including the upmarket Tatler and underground title Another magazine competing for a share of a limited audience. Several new publications, including Monocle, the eclectic periodical created by Wallpaper* founder Tyler Brule, are also vying with uber-trendy upstarts such as Pop for readers and advertisers.

Gwyther has spent the past several years flying around the world, glad-handing clients in glamorous locations. 'It's been harder work than I expected,' he says, 'but these people become your friends as well as your contacts. It's fun.'

The hard work has paid off; his holding company, Visual Talent, has survived and prospered. Wonderland, published every other month, sells around 80,000 copies, half of them overseas, and a six monthly title, Man About Town, launched last year, about 25,000. Something of a man about town himself with his tailored jacket and designer stubble, Gwyther wants to take Wonderland monthly and launch editions in emerging markets.

Moscow, which has the highest number of billionaires per capita of any city, is high on his list, and he flew to Hong Kong to search for similar opportunities in the Far East last week. He would also like to publish Man About Town, a coffee-table magazine full of culture and arts coverage, more often.

The company has outgrown its west London offices and new premises are being sought further east, where the City's creative community has migrated in recent years. But Gwyther will need more resources to make those dreams a reality. Although both titles are filled with an impressive array of advertising from most of the major global luxury-good giants, including LVMH, Gucci and Prada, the last accounts filed by Visual Talent show that it had less than £70,000 in the bank.

Gwyther claims the group is profitable; every penny made is being ploughed back into the editorial offering, which he argues has improved month on month. But after persuading Jones – who confessed he had rarely read an upmarket lifestyle magazine, let alone invested in one – to part with his money, a further injection of cash is required.

Jones's cash helped pay for offices and a small staff of a dozen or so. But a partnership with an established publisher with the buying power to negotiate better deals with suppliers, or ensure Gwyther's titles are placed prominently on magazine racks, could prove fruitful.

Another large magazine group, such as Vogue publisher Conde Nast or National Magazines, which publishes Esquire, would fit the bill, though with a global economic downturn looming, some wonder if luxury titles will struggle to survive. Others insist they are recession-proof, arguing that high rollers continue to spend regardless of the economic weather. Gwyther will be hoping any prospective investors take the latter view.

[kimair]

National Magazine Awards 2008 Finalists

The New Yorker and New York, stalwarts of recent years, continued to lead with 12 and nine nominations, respectively. Vanity Fair was strong with six nominations, followed by GQ and National Geographic with five each. Esquire, which was nominated seven times last year and won once, did not have as much luck this year, with one nomination, for magazine section.

In core fashion titles, W received two nominations – one for General Excellence and one for photography – while Elle was nominated for essays and Glamour for general excellence in the over two million circulation category.

First-time nominees included Domino, Good and The New York Times Magazine which, in all its permutations, received a total of six nominations. The Times magazine was eligible this year, as ASME moved to include newspaper supplements for the first time, and had a strong showing both for its main weekly and for its T style and Play spin-offs.

wwd

[Omnis]

I was just wondering how the major fashion magazines compare when it comes to sales.

Vogue Paris say the sell about 130 000 copies of their magazine.

What about Vogue Italia, Vogue UK, Vogue Germany, Vogue US, Numéro, i-D, V, W, etc?



Edit; Somehow I managed to write an extra s in the topic, but I'm not able to edit it.

[Papyrus]

Good thread, but I think this should go in the Business of Magazines thread?

[tigerrouge]

I remember a few years back, posting all the Vogue circulation info for a thread at fashist, and many people were surprised at how few copies are sold of Vogue Italia and Vogue Paris, people forget they're almost like loss-leaders, they're Conde Nast's reputation-makers, while other magazines in the stable get on with the hard work of raising some revenue to pay for these vanity publications.

That said, I can't see Vogue Italia failing to make money on carrying so many ads in their heftier issues, which brings me to trying to remember where I read an article that claimed that in carrying such huge amounts of advertising, magazines do start paying for themselves - for their own production - and a future business model could see magazines be offered free to readers, who agree to be exposed to all that advertising.

[fashionistasista]

www.magazine.org is always a great site for industry news.

Here is what the US Vogues circulations are - I would have thought that these are the largest internationally, out of any of the Vogue titles?

If this is correct i find it hard to believe that Paris Vogue only circulates 100,000! Australian Vogue circulates around 70,000 and it is not pushed internationally like Paris Vogue is.

(im such a numbers nerd - sorry for anyone else that thinks this is really dry - i think it is facinating (who is selling what etc))

Subscription:799,309 61%Verified Subscriptions: 50,0594%Newsstand:452,20735%Total Average Paid Circulation:1,301,575100%Ratebase:1,200,000TOTAL AUDIENCE10,635,000Female / Male88% / 12%Median Age36 yearsMedia Household Income$64,882

[MissMagAddict]

source | nytimes

Double Dutch
THEIR PUBLISHING EMPIRE CONSISTS OF TWO TITLES, AND ONE OF THEM’S CALLED BUTT. HOW GERT JONKERS AND JOP VAN BENNEKOM ARE QUIETLY SAVING MAGAZINES.
BY CATHY HORYN

The story of how Gert Jonkers and Jop van Bennekom, two Dutchmen from the Bible Belt of the Netherlands, came to found a magazine for gays called Butt, followed by a style magazine for anyone called Fantastic Man, is a story of dreams, dreams being really the start of identity. If it weren’t for the fact that Jonkers’s father was a Protestant minister who made his six children read on Sundays — reading was the only activity allowed except church services— would Jonkers have found a way through the boringness of his youth to make a magazine that was essentially about reading? It is an interesting question. And van Bennekom, whose father owned a garage in the same region and whose aunts, uncles and grandparents were all farmers: would van Bennekom, without such humbleness, have quite so clearly identified that the central experience missing in magazines in the early part of the 21st century was a feeling for simplicity and directness?

Of course, there were other influences, as you’d expect from two men pushing 40 and living in Amsterdam. Jonkers is also a fashion critic for De Volkskrant, a Dutch daily newspaper, and van Bennekom freelances for a few fashion labels, though he won’t reveal which ones. But the striking quality about Butt and Fantastic Man is that, though they provide the same distractions as any porn or fashion magazine — the same bun shots (although Butt’s are usually less muscular) and designer sandals — that’s not why people go to them. They go to them to learn about people, famous ones like Michael Stipe, Rufus Wainwright and Marc Jacobs, who have appeared in Butt, or Helmut Lang, who gave his first real interview in several years to Fantastic Man. But they also go to find out about obscure ones like the Dutch graphic designer Wim Crouwel or a New Zealand hand model with a foot fetish named Stuart. At a time when mainstream media have lost readers to the Internet, Butt and Fantastic Man have steadily grown in numbers and influence, despite using the traditional means that many magazines reject, like liberal amounts of text and black-and-white photos. At the same time, however, the magazines are anything but nostalgic. That’s why my mind did a loop when van Bennekom said during our lunch with Jonkers in Paris: "I think traditional things are right now the most interesting. There’s always a chance in five years that Fantastic Man will be the most modern style magazine that there is.”

What makes a magazine modern, I asked him.

"That’s a question we ask ourselves all the time,” van Bennekom said. "I think it’s reading — the whole idea of concentrating and being alone in a room. I think that’s what a magazine has to offer: a reading experience.”

Both Butt and Fantastic Man are audacious in style and content — and for completely different reasons. Butt, printed on 9-by-13-inch pink paper, folded and staple-bound, has retained its homemade look since its debut, 22 issues ago, in 2001. It presumes that its readers, who now number some 24,000, are not only intelligent but also friendly and preoccupied at least part of the time with things other than sex, although nudity and discussions about sex are integral to the magazine and offered as casually as a ham at Christmas. Starting from its title, Butt is also very funny in the silly rather than campy sense. Consider some of its headlines: "Boring Interview With a Random Gay Stranger”; "Embarrassing Interview With a One-Night Stand”; and "Disgusting Interview With a Toilet Cleaner.” Because there is nothing specifically gay about photos of a flaccid fat man poised on a gym ball or a Q. & A. with Gore Vidal that ends with the interviewer (in this case, Jonkers) being neatly dismissed in the Vidal mode, the humor feels inclusive and therefore funnier. As van Bennekom said, describing the magazine’s essence, he and Jonkers got the idea for the title while drinking one night in an old-school leather bar in Amsterdam called De Spijker. "The bar had two TV screens, one with porn and the other would be playing cartoons, like ‘Tom & Jerry,’ " van Bennekom said. "I thought it was so funny.”

To the extent that Butt’s playfulness and lack of snob appeal is about undressing, Fantastic Man, first published in 2005, is about dressing up.

Printed on matte light-gray paper at the standard size, Fantastic Man projects a dashing smartness that makes it look not only more mature than glossy style magazines but also more genuinely interested in sartorial points. The latest issue, autumn/winter 2007-8, contains an eight-page spread on classic haircuts by Guido Palau, shot in the portrait style of a barbershop magazine, followed by an article on hosiery, complete with details about fiber content. Yet despite such fastidiousness and an arched tone, there is no homosexual subtext; and in contrast to Butt, Fantastic Man does not show nudity or expect its subjects to discuss their sex lives, though they might.

Yves Saint Laurent’s Stefano Pilati, a 2006 cover, said, "It’s one of the first male magazines that I really considered male.” He added: "It has an appreciation for people and what they’re doing with their lives. You feel quite relieved in a sense to let yourself go and say what you want. You feel a dialogue with the magazine that you don’t have with many others.” Given the flexible range of topics — from profiles of artists and musicians to a piece about the joys of lake swimming — and the magazine’s tailored design and refreshing distance from consumer trends and credits, it’s easy to imagine almost anyone as a Fantastic Man.

I asked Jonkers and van Bennekom who they thought qualified. "Morrissey,” van Bennekom replied quickly.

"I think Steve Jobs is a Fantastic Man,” Jonkers said. "This may sound surprising to some Americans, but I think Bill Clinton is a Fantastic Man. The mayor of Berlin would be good for the magazine.”

What is remarkable about both Butt and Fantastic Man, perhaps more so with Butt, is that they are political but not in an obvious way. They tapped into a constituency that was going unrepresented in both the gay and mainstream media: people not so much interested in being sexually explicit as sexually honest. Jonkers and van Bennekom, who met in the ’90s while working on separate publications, produced the first Butt for about $2,000.

They asked Wolfgang Tillmans to shoot the designer Bernhard Willhelm, a rather daunting gambit since Tillmans had recently won the Turner Prize and they didn’t know him; but as van Bennekom put it mildly, "Who else?”

Tillmans did photograph Willhelm in a series of revealing poses, and is now sort of the conscience of Butt. But while Tillmans is always encouraging the men to move in a more political direction, they say it has done enough by recognizing a community, one that now stretches from the Netherlands to China and Peru and that has produced several pinkish clones. When Butt started, van Bennekom said, the emancipation of gays in Europe was more or less over. "Gay marriage had come through, not only in the Netherlands but also in countries like Spain,” he said. "The whole political movement was bankrupt intellectually.” He added: "Nothing felt underground or funny. I mean, where did the humor go? Did the humor really end with [the artists] Pierre and Gilles and that kind of camp? Do we all have to aim at one type of body?” (They started a publication for lesbians — its title unprintable here — but it soon died. Apparently lesbians don’t have the same sense of humor.)

Butt makes a small profit, and Jonkers and van Bennekom recently moved into a tiny office in a modern building overlooking a square. But while the magazines are influential (it’s hard not to credit them for a new appreciation in fashion ads for mature-looking men), they are precise about what they want. It’s the Dutch in them. As van Bennekom said, "there’s an undeniable magic and integrity in reality,” and as Jonkers added, "We found out we can do things that we ourselves like.”

[fashionistasista]

Fantastic Man is an amazing magazine though..... love these guys...

[sillysara495]

Originally Posted by fashionistasista

www.magazines.org is always a great site for industry news.

It is actually www.magazine.org

no s at the end of magazine

[fashionistasista]

whoops - thanks silly sara.. i was just writing that from memory

[tigerrouge]

Conde Nast To Mags: Fine, Run Your Own Web Sites
by Michael Learmonth, March 21, 2008
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/3/w...thout_condenet_

Is Conde Nast ready to overhaul its famously complicated Internet strategy? No. But it is about to give its magazine a bit of what they're clamoring for -- a chance to run their own Web sites.

Conde Nast's Web structure is byzantine at best. Some of the publisher's magazines, like Bon Appetit and Vogue, don't really have Web sites at all, but simply point to sites run by CondeNet, which manages Web-only brands like Epicurious, Concierge.com and Style.com. But CondeNet does manage other magazine titles, like Wired.com. Still other Conde Web titles, like Vanity Fair, work within a different Conde group. And Portfolio.com, launched last year, runs on its own.

Confused? So are Conde's editors and publishers: Once dismissive of the Web, they're now intently interested, and think they can do better left to their own devices. The new ammunition for their argument is Portfolio, which after a slow start seems to have the makings of a successful Web site, an accomplishment it pulled off by itself.

In part to diffuse the rancor, Conde Nast says it will let each magazine handle its own Web site -- eventually. W got its own site last year; Gourmet.com went up in January; Bon Appettit will get one in April. Even the venerable Vogue is getting its own site, but it will have to wait until 2009.

"Over the years there have been very passionate feelings about this," acknowledges CondeNet boss Sarah Chubb. The newish plan, she says, is to have CondeNet run the non-magazine Web sites but sell ads for all of the Conde properties. The one exception: She's going to hang on to a piece of Wired.com, which has also taken off recently.

The decision to keep Wired.com within CondeNet was made by Steve Newhouse, heir apparent the Advance Publications empire. It's now being run as a hybrid between Chubb and Group Publisher David Carey, who also runs Portfolio, as well as Portfolio's Web site.

As we said, Conde's Web strategy is... complicated. And that's not going to change anytime soon.

[tigerrouge]

Conde Nast snags Interview veterans for Vanity Fair
Mon Mar 17
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080317/.../vanityfair_dc

CondeNast said on Monday it has hired two veteran executives from Interview magazine to help run the European editions of Vanity Fair, one of the publishing empire's fastest-growing businesses.

Ingrid Sischy and Sandy Brant will be the international editors for the Italian and German editions of Vanity Fair, as well as a Spanish edition of the magazine set for launch in September.

From 1990 until a few weeks ago, Sischy was the editor of Interview magazine, which was founded and run by late pop art superstar Andy Warhol. Sischy also writes for Vanity Fair's U.S. edition.

Brant served as chief executive, president and publisher of Interview's parent company, Brant Publications, for 23 years.

"They've been on the scene a long time... in the front row of every fashion show. They have close personal ties to Hollywood, to the art world," Conde Nast International Chairman Jonathan Newhouse said in an interview. "They are people with ideas who move through the worlds of intelligentsia, art and fashion."

Sischy and Brant will be in charge of the privately held Conde Nast's growing European presence. Unlike the U.S. Vanity Fair, the Italian and German editions are weeklies.

The Italian version, which launched in September 2003, has a paid circulation of 263,000 and had more than 6,300 ad pages last year. The German edition, which launched in February 2007, has a paid circulation of 188,000 copies.

Conde Nast International publishes 103 magazines in 22 countries. Its parent company publishes magazines such as Conde Nast Portfolio and Wired.

[tigerrouge]

New Woman magazine closes
March 28, 2008 08:04am
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599...5-1702,00.html

AUSTRALIAN magazine New Woman will close after 20 years' publication.

ACP Magazines announced yesterday that the last issue of the monthly title would go on sale in early April.

The magazine began production in 1988 under Murdoch Magazines, which was later bought out by Emap.

ACP began publishing New Woman late last year when it took over Emap.

The Australian version was the only one left in the world, after the UK closed down its own edition in February.

ACP said the decision came because the magazine had been struggling to sell over the past 18 months, with circulation down 40 per cent in that time.

ACP Magazines chief executive Scott Lorson said ACP had made the decision to close down the magazine "sooner rather than later".

"The title has enjoyed some success in the past, but has struggled to establish a unique and sustainable position in the highly competitive women's lifestyle category," Mr Lorson said.

"When we purchased the Emap business, we were aware of the significant challenges facing New Woman."

ACP Magazines group publisher of women's lifestyle titles Pat Ingram thanked the staff for all their work, and said the company would look to employ them on other titles.

[SnejanaIsMyMuse]

This might be the wrong place to ask this ,but does anyone know where I can find the nearest magazine distributor phone number that sends magazines to borders and other stores?

[paperbag]

Originally Posted by SnejanaIsMyMuse

This might be the wrong place to ask this ,but does anyone know where I can find the nearest magazine distributor phone number that sends magazines to borders and other stores?

May I ask why? You can usually ask your local Borders to stock magazines you want to buy if that is what you're looking for.