Felix Dennis: Maxim made $3bn and now is the time to innovate again
'Feel free to report back to your colleagues that Felix Dennis has lost the plot,' says Dennis as he outlines how the cavalier Maxim approach might just be the model for future magazine successes.
Felix Dennis, chairman and founder of Dennis Publishing, said today that Maxim magazine had generated more than $3bn (£2bn) since he launched the title almost 15 years ago.
Addressing the FIPP World Magazine Congress, in London, Dennis used his cavalier and anarchic approach to publishing Maxim as an example of how others could innovate their way out of an economic downturn and urged magazine publishers to seize the opportunities presented by the current downturn.
"Conservatively, after doing my homework I estimate that worldwide Maxim has to date generated over $3bn in profits for its publishers, distributors, licensees, licensors and its owners, and the actual figure may be much higher. Now, that's a chunk of change for a rag born in a smoke-filled London pub," he said.
He told delegates that the current economic climate would be seen in 10 years' time as "one of the greatest financial opportunities in the history of our industry" as innovative magazine producers would take up the mantel to create new, innovative publications.
Dennis told delegates how, against the better advice of a magazine consultant, he launched Maxim "in the middle of a recession" in the US in 1997, two years after launching in the UK.
"He told me 'this is a bad idea, it's likely to fail… categorically I urge you to reject it out of hand'," Dennis said as he told delegates how ignoring this advice had led to his title peaking with sales of 2.5m in the US – "more than the total circulation of all the other men's
magazines combined" – and spawning imitators across the industry.
Dennis eventually sold his
US magazine interests to private equity firm Quadrangle Capital Partners in 2007 for a rumoured $240m (£121m), keeping his UK edition under licence.
"In many territories Maxim will continue to shower golden rain of useful know-how and irreverent idiocy on readers as well as making its publishers a ton of money. And in many countries, believe it or not, is still growing. And not just on the web," he said.
The UK edition announced last month it was closing its print edition after 14 years to become online only. Despite this, Dennis added, it was its free-wheeling innovation – including telling the US press that a pet hamster was now the title's editor – that made it a success and will likely bring success in an economic downturn.
"Feel free to report back to your colleagues that Felix Dennis has lost the plot," he told delegates. "And that as a poet he lives in a lyrical dream of the distant past and that his little company now poses little possible threat to rivals in this room, that he will not be poaching any of your best staff, who will not be scouring the world to spend his ill-gotten gains setting up titles or launching new websites against you.
"And that the bearded dwarf is fast asleep in his dilapidated pirate ship while the Dennis Publishing crew is dying, sinking into sloth and drunken idleness. Good luck to you ladies and gentlemen in these harrowing times. Magazines are going through a very rough patch, but we are not done yet. Not by a very long shot.
"I predict that in 10 years' time, many of us will be gathered in another venue, nattering and bargaining, and telling each other the same old lies for the same old reasons.
"But those who will to embrace the once in a lifetime circumstances the recession offers, opportunities to restructure, to change, to grow by acquiring distressed assets and to gather ourselves for the sunlit uplands of the digital future, for all those individuals and those companies, the murderous recession of 2008/2009 and perhaps 2010, will come to be viewed for what it really was: one of the greatest financial opportunities in the history of our industry."
