The extraordinary fall in magazine circulation reported for the period to December 31, 2015 fits with what I reported earlier in the newsagency sales benchmark study – among the worst declines we have seen for many titles.
This cannot continue.
As I have written previously, the best opportunity for specialty magazine publishers, those publishing special interest titles, titles outside the top 20 sellers, is to focus solely on the newsagency channel. We are their best hope to stop the decline and, hopefully, grow sales.
Newsagents are specialty retailers. We understand catering to niche interests. To many of us, magazines are not a commodity.
- Give us control over the titles we carry.
- Give us control over the volume we receive.
- Eliminate the requirement to return unsold stock.
- Compensate us so we can make money from magazines.
- Respect us.
- Quit supermarkets and other mass retail channels.
Together we can arrest the decline of many magazine titles.
If you are publisher looking at this and saying sales are declining in newsagencies why would I do this – because what you pay today does not cover newsagent operating costs, why should newsagents support titles for less than a living wage?
Well said Mark,
Some of our number for Jan 16 vs Jan 15
Mags down 13%
cards & wrap down 3%
stationery up 71%
ISI up 12% Lotto up 32%
Jan 16 vs Jan 15
Mags down 13 %
Cards n wrap down 1%
Stationery up 49%
Gifts up 16% T
Toys up 20%
Isi and Lotto up 19% on sales
I cannot see mags taking space away from gifts and toys in my store. I am cutting mags further this year.
Couldn’t agree more Mark.
Magazines for us declined a further 13% in January. When we dissect the figures we see that it is a loss of takings of $3,000. Working the figures back the profit lost is $681, or only $22 a day.
Our gifts are up $7,000, or $102 a day profit.
Our answer, today we pulled out another 90 pockets of magazines.
Whilst we will continue to support the special interest titles by optimising our magazine space by multiple overlapping of titles that sell only a title or two per month, there will come a time when either the margin must be increased or more pockets are lost to other higher margin product.
It is such a terribly wasteful system with our labour costs, transport and don’t forget how many trees are wasted every year that don’t need to be(How many times can a mag be recycled).
Tick, tick, tick, tick. Time for change before it’s too late publishers!
The only wan to fix this is to act on the list in this and stop the ear of paternalism.
i have just finished my shopfit by reducing from 700 pockets to around 300 pockets and no changes in my sales.
To me magazines are dying faster than newspapers
Our interesting Jan 2016 v 2015 numbers:
Mags: Down 25%
Hobby: Up 95% (and more than covering the lost magazine sales)
Newspapers down 10%
Drycleaning (30% margin) up 23% (and again more than covering lost newspaper sales)
Lotto up 22% (but of course crap margin)
So just looking at these few categories where am I going to put my effort and money ? Not Newspapers or magazines anymore that’s for certain unless something changes and very quickly !