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How today’s magazine market is different

The vibes surrounding the future of print have definitely changed, but what does the modern magazine market look like? Peter Houston outlines what is different now and why in this feature from our latest report.

There’s no question that there has been a switch away from the ‘print is dead’ narrative that has dogged magazine publishing for decades. I hear ‘print is not dead’ the way I used to hear about its imminent demise.

Peak print positivity has to be a recent article in The Guardian covering the demise of The Lady. Rather than use the closure of the 140-year old society title as proof of print death, the headline proclaimed that women’s magazines are still thriving despite the closure.

The call for a different narrative has come, as much as anything, from inside the house.

When I talked to Hearst UK CEO Katie Vanneck Smith about extending print’s runway, she scolded: “That sort of language worries me. Consumers are ultimately the people who will decide whether the joy of a physical product is part of their media diet. I think we talk ourselves into some of this stuff.”

Taking to the stage at this year’s PPA Festival, Katie spoke with Enders Analysis CEO Douglas McCabe about premium print following his keynote presentation. He focused on the findings of the ‘Rewriting the media playbook’, reporting that while ‘print will retain a role’, the website is dying.

The vibes surrounding the future of print have definitely changed, but what does the modern market for magazines actually look like?

By the numbers

The headline magazine circulation figures have not made for great reading in quite some time. In the second half of 2024, print circulation across the top 50 US magazines fell 5% year-on-year according to numbers from the Alliance for Audited Media (AAM). Hidden in that average are some dizzying falls, with 17 of the top-50 posting double-digit drops.

The story is similar in the UK, where more than half of the 164 magazines audited by ABC saw their print distribution retract by 10%. Again, there are some on the list posting circulation falls that are almost three times the average.

But there are also some good news stories hidden in the spreadsheets.

In America, The Atlantic grew its print circulation to more than half a million, up by over 12%. Several regional titles also chalked up print circulation gains, with Kentucky Living up almost 9%.

In the UK, 13 audited titles increased their distribution. Homes & Gardens, where the average number of copies circulated per issue is just over 50,000, was up 8%. Slimming World Magazine, circulating about 270,000 copies per issue, upped its print circulation by 6% year-on-year.

And audited circulation data doesn’t tell the whole story, not least because many publishers have dropped out of audits – especially in the UK. Many of the niche and independent magazines doing well in print have never even considered getting audited.

Possibly more interesting to publishers than individual magazine circulation figures is the overall size of the world magazine market, specifically the percentage of revenue print contributes to the bottom line. Remember, PwC puts it at 80% for consumer magazines in its Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2022-2026.

Looking forward, PwC forecasts the percentage of revenue coming from print will fall to 75% by 2026, but that’s still three quarters of publisher revenue dependent on printed publications – not bad for a supposedly dead format. Even in B2B, where the drive for digital utility has been decidedly more aggressive, PwC projects print will still return 45% of publisher revenues in 2026.

Echoing PwC’s findings, survey results in International Federation of Periodical Publishers’ (FIPP) 2023 ‘Future of print’ reported that for more than half the respondents, print accounted for more than 50% of revenues.

Global print revenues are undoubtedly dropping. A mid-2023 Guardian article reported that UK consumer spending on print magazines had fallen from £1.4 billion in 2010 to less than £500 million in 2021. But rather than seeing rapid declines, three quarters of respondents to the FIPP survey – produced the same year as the Guardian article – saw print revenue rising, holding steady or falling slowly.

In the US, print is still a top-three revenue driver for magazine publishers. AAM Chief Executive Richard Murphy told Press Gazette ‘the unsexy truth’ is that for many publishers, print remains a key income stream. “It’s generally in the top three revenue buckets for every publisher out there,” he said. “Usually digital is number one, events are number two and then print is number three.”

Repositioning print

Juan Señor, lead author of the annual ‘Innovation in Media World Report’ said last year that print is not disappearing: “It’s evolving into a premium medium… finding a new purpose. Think of it as the vinyl of media – tactile, premium, and deeply valued by those who engage with it.”

The print-vinyl analogy doesn’t quite work, not least because before vinyl began its fightback, there was no large-scale vinyl pressing on the planet; US vinyl sales were as little as $14 million at their low point in 2005. While print magazine sales have been falling consistently, the value of the market has stayed in the billions rather than the millions – $60 billion according to PwC.

Long story short, vinyl actually did die… while print never did.

But even though the vinyl market’s resurrection and the re-energising of the print market are not exactly the same, there are concrete lessons for publishers to learn from the stellar 18-year rebound of vinyl sales. The biggest is investment in premium positioning.

While the vinyl market is a long way from its glory days in the 1970s, when more than 300 million LPs and EPs were sold every year, the return to sales of more than 43 million units in 2024, up from less than 1 million in 2006, is truly inspiring. And vinyl’s reanimation is no accident: The music industry brought vinyl back from the dead by creating products that superfans had to have.

True fans

Speaking to the Guardian in 2023, Enders analyst Abi Watson said, “Given the scale of decline in their consumer demand, physical magazines are today a considerably oversupplied category. Closures will inevitably accelerate in the coming years.”

Anyone with just a passing interest in the magazine market knows that closures are far from rare. One of the most depressing parts of the Coronavirus pandemic, professionally at least, was watching the mounting total of magazine brands leaving the newsstand as the crisis unfolded.

But it doesn’t just take a pandemic to close a magazine. In the UK, DC Thomson cut four publications early in 2025; Future ceased printing Total Film late in 2024; Grand Designs and Good Homes from Media 10 stopped printing around the same time; Bauer’s Your Coarse Fishing went earlier in 2024.

To survive in a contracting market, print publishers could do worse than revisit Kevin Kelly’s thoughts on the value of true fans. Back in 2008, the founding executive editor of Wired wrote an iconic internet-age essay that leans into the ‘collectors’ business model. In ‘1,000 True Fans’, Kelly suggested that creators don’t need millions of customers, they need a thousand who will ‘buy anything you produce’.

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