Magazine Industry Overview

There are over 3,000 consumer magazines that are available in the UK and reach a massive 87% of the adult population making the UK's consumer magazine industry worth £2.8bn (2008). On average, every person in the UK buys around 22 magazines a year spending £36 a year just on magazines, through more than 1.1 billion consumer magazines being sold in the UK in 2008 making the magazine industry in the UK is a huge part of media consumption.
The top selling magazine in the UK August 2014 were TV Choice coming first selling 1,303,011 copies with increased sales by 1.6%.
The top selling music magazine being FHM selling 37,283 copies.
Although comparing the two the sales gap looks much but taking consumer interest into consideration it shows exactly why these sales are so high for the type of magazines it presents. A TV listings magazine being the top selling represents its huge target audience, 95% of UK homes own a digital TV meaning their target audience can be almost anyone. Whereas a smaller percentage of people will have major interest in music or consider it to be an interest or hobby, making the target audience smaller.

However, magazine's have recently lost print sales on an average of 6.3% due to the increased use of media technology. People are beginning to favour online versions of magazines, books and newspapers due to it's easy accessibility and convenience for the general public. This could also be a problem for magazine's advertisers being the UK consumer advertising market accounting for almost 11% of the entire European market in 2007. Not having the many pages to advertise on could also make magazines lose out on money, not wanting to fog up their websites with constant advertisement which could ultimately drive people away from purchasing the magazine in paper or online.
Magazines still continue to display their online sites to their customers and make them available for them to use, this could be because it can keep readers happy and satisfied to continue buying the magazine by perhaps giving more readable and interactive content through a magazines online website.

In all, the Magazine industry is a vast and widespread business that differentiates in many ways and allows thousands of companies to make masses amount of money and profit and creates thousands of jobs for people in the UK, playing a huge part of our counties economy. Technology still a very new concept, magazines in the past few years haven't adapted well to it's popularity and has become a competitor to the industry, but I think eventually will be able to adapt to technology and still find ways in becoming a bigger and more successful, money-making business.