Obama As Cover Model: Does He Sell?

This morning, I fulfilled a lifelong dream* by appearing on the Today show, where the topic was whether Rolling Stone's crush on Barack Obama will help him or hurt him. This made me wonder: Will Obama help or hurt Rolling Stone? That is to say, when it comes to boosting magazine sales, can the best-looking, most stylish presidential candidate in...well, maybe ever...can he compete with actual celebrities?

The answer is yes, but not always. By and large, Obama has been a boon for magazines whose covers he has graced. Start with Rolling Stone, which just put him on for the second time. The magazine's first Obama cover, which came out in March, may have been unhelpfully worshipful, but it was a hot seller, moving 171,140 copies, according to a report to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, making it the title's best seller of the year to date, and far exceeding its 2007 average of 132,044. No wonder Jann Wenner was so eager for an encore. The candidate and his wife also fronted last week's issue of Us Weekly, Rolling Stone's sister title; figures aren't out yet, but I'm hearing sales were above average for what has otherwise been a slack year.

The Atlantic also scored big with its December issue, whose cover story was an Andrew Sullivan essay on "Why Obama Matters." That issue, which sold 73,500 copies, was The Atlantic's best seller of the year, performing 28 percent better than average.

Three men's magazines have put Obama on the cover so far. Men's Vogue saw the biggest lift. Its Sept. 2006 issue sold 129,582 copies, the second-highest total for any issue so far, after only the debut issue, which was on newsstands considerably longer. GQ's Sept. 2007 issue sold a little better than its average for the period, at 245,105 copies, but 12 percent less than the year-earlier issue, which featured Clive Owen. Then there's Esquire, which put Obama on its June 2008 cover; sales figures haven't been released yet, and a spokesman declined to comment.

One monthly magazine that emphatically did not benefit from Obama was Vibe, whose Sept. 2007 issue was its worst seller of the past 12 years. (ABC's online archive goes back to 1996.) Could it be that GQ and Vibe, by featuring him in the same month, cannibalized each other's readers?

For the weeklies, Obama seems to be a hit-and-miss proposition, subject to the whims of the news cycle. A December Time cover and a January Newsweek cover were both below-average sellers, but Newsweek's July 16, 2007 issue sold 124,290 copies, putting it among the top-selling single-week issues of the year. And Time's Oct. 23, 2006 cover, "Why Barack Obama Could Be the Next President," was the title's second-best selling issue of the year, with 206,000 copies.

-----

*My mom's