Magazine industry overview

The magazine industry is a very large, money making business, with more than 8,000 titles published in Britian. Annually the market for magazines make approximately 7 billion pounds, its employment is roughly 48,000 and contains about 2 thousand different businesses inside it. However the annual growth for the industry is at a low (-4.7%) and only 3 out of 10 new magazines manage to maintain sales for their product for longer than four years.
This fall in sales and distribution has  been argued to be the fault of new technology. To hear about current affairs and read the latest on gossip we no longer need to go to our nearest shop. We can now read it at home infront of a computer or laptop screen. Online websites enable us to not have to leave our house and therefore not buy magazines. This also applies for new 'smartphones' which hold apps allowing us to read a 'virtual' newspaper or magazine.
Bearing this in mind, advertisements that would once of paid for their advert to be viewed in a magazine will not need to do such things anymore. Paying a smaller amount to advertise your brand online may seem now appealing to companies, especially if they want to save money, as this is now just as effective as putting an advert in a magazine.
The consumer magazine industry is shared between four large companies, these being Bauer Media (which recently in 2008, took over Emap the 2nd largest publisher) which produces 26%, IPC Media (Times Warner) producing 20%, BBC Magazines publishing 8% and The National Magazine company LTD (Hearst) producing 7%.
The majority of magazines in the UK are published for consumer (90%), these include titles that include Elle and Glamour but can also apply of magazines known as consumer specialists, for example Gardeners world.