Starving Magazine Publishers Eat Their Young

This week the Audit Bureau of Circulations released its survey of magazines' newsstand and subscription sales, offering a glimpse of the (relative) health of the industry. While newsstand sales of single copies were down 12 percent in the first half of the year, subscriptions were up an average of just 0.6 percent.

Some takeaways:

Readers—well, rubberneckers—appear to have grown bored of glossy celebrity weeklies and their Kremlinological study of Jon, Kate, Brad, Angelina, Octomom, and the rest. The New York Times' Stephanie Clifford noted that People, Us Weekly, OK!, In Touch, Star, and Life & Style have all slipped on the newsstand. OK! tumbled the hardest with a 20.4 percent drop, while Us Weekly only stubbed its toe with a 3 percent newsstand decline. That should quell concerns over Us's future after the departure of editor Janice Min in July.

Saveur did well relative to its competitors. As Mediabistro's FishbowlNY blog noted, Bonnier's 15-year-old cooking title had a circulation increase of 4.3 percent (citing the magazine's publisher, Merri Lee Kingsly, not ABC) as its competitors, Food & Wine, Bon Appetit, Gourmet (the latter two owned by Condé Nast, which like Portfolio.com is a part of Advance Publications). A Saveur press release (here reproduced on Fox Business News's website) from July heralded a 9.5 percent increase in ad pages for the August/September issue of the magazine, its biggest issue ever.

It may have filed for bankruptcy earlier this month, but Reader's Digest can pat itself on the back for maintaining dominance despite a 3.4 percent decline: With over 8 million readers, It's the third-highest-circulation magazine in America after AARP: The Magazine and AARP Bulletin. What can we say? Old folks are living longer (to 77.9 years old, according to a recent 7CDC report) and reading more.

Now, If only there were a celebrity cooking magazine for older Americans.