Magazine Advertising: Getting Worse

Why, to answer the question I posed earlier, have there been so many fewer new magazines started this year than last? Maybe it's because would-be publishers see how much worse the ad market's getting for even well-established titles.

The total number of magazine ad pages sold in the second quarter of 2008, as reported to the Publishers Information Bureau, represented an 8.7 percent contraction as compared with the year-earlier period. That marks a slight acceleration of the decline from the first quarter, when pages were down 7.4 percent year-over-year. (Pages are generally considered a better measure of magazines' health than the ad revenue numbers reported to PIB, since the revenue numbers don't reflect rate discounts, which tend to get steeper as the economy softens.)

The New York Times manages to put a positive spin on all this, noting, "Magazines continue to do significantly better than newspapers.... Analysts and industry executives say that although the cyclical economic forces are similar, magazines so far have not been seriously hurt by the shift of readers and advertisers to the Internet, as newspapers have."

Well, sure, if you're going to use newspapers as your yardstick, everything looks good. But for a better sense of where the magazine business is headed, look at the weeklies, which, owing to their shorter lead time, tend to experience ad declines, and recoveries, first:

Time..............................................-21.1 percent
Newsweek.....................................-22.4 percent
U.S. News.....................................-30.3 percent
BusinessWeek...............................-14.8 percent
Entertainment Weekly...................-16.8 percent
The New Yorker............................-20.1 percent
The New York Times Magazine......-8.4 percent

Of course there are exceptions -- The Economist, TV Guide, OK. But does anyone want to bet pages won't be down still more in the third quarter?