The Descent of Men's Magazines

December's Maxim with Ashley Greene on the cover.

Image: Joe Kohen/Getty Images for Maxim

Today's New York Post features a Page Six item about a $40 million hostile takeover bid for Maxim magazine being made by Andrew Fox, CEO of something called Track Entertainment. Page Six hints at the fact that this offer should be taken with a grain of salt since a spokesperson for the magazine told them, "We have received no offer, and there is no negotiation."

But that doesn't mean that a seemingly ludicrous offer (or, um, non-offer) from a company no one's really heard of (Track's website says it "connects brands and consumers through events, television, digital media, and lifestyle marketing," whatever that means) can't spark a new round of speculation at the future of men's magazines, a genre that has been in a long, slow decline for at least a decade.

Earlier this month, Bloomberg's Serena Saitto and Lauren Coleman-Lochner reported that Playboy was considering selling itself to Iconix Brand Group, owners of Candie's shows and London Fog. A figure of $300 million was floated out, a pretty high valuation for the 56-year-old magazine and lifestyle brand. The company reported revenue of $56 million in the third quarter, down from $70.4 million in the second, according to paidContent's Rafat Ali. The magazine recently laid off 25 people as it outsourced all its publishing operations to AMI to offset costs. Unless Iconix wanted to ignore the magazine—or leave it as a loss leader, as it seems to be now—and focus on apparel and other ventures, that seems like a lot to pay for a magazine whose circulation has fallen and which hasn't packed much cultural cache since before most of its models were born.

Like Playboy, Maxim was once the market leader in the men's magazine genre—for better or for worse, depending on your individual tolerance for scantily clad CW starlets—but has had a bad few years. The current majority owner of the magazine's parent company, Alpha Group, is Cereberus Capital Management, which bought out the Quadrangle Group in July, according to a report from the New York Post's Keith Kelly. The magazine has lost 33.5 percent of its advertising this year, according to a MediaDailyNews post from Erik Sass from May. Joe Levy, late of Alpha's folded music magazine Blender, was appointed editor in chief of the magazine in March, the ninth editor the magazine has had since launching in the U.S. in 1997. Several high-profile layoffs followed in April. Stuff, Maxim's kid-brother magazine, was folded in 2007.

Maxim and Playboy aren't the only men's magazines feeling a little less secure right now. GQ's ad pages declined 32 percent this year (again according to MDN), and like other Condé Nast titles, the magazine has had to lay off employees in the last few months, as did its brother publication, Details. (Disclosure: Portfolio.com is owned by American City Business Journals, a division of Advance Publications, owners of Condé Nast.) Esquire has been resorting to increasingly gimmicky ideas—augmented reality! mix-and-match covers! digital covers!—to get attention. It's almost as if the whole men's magazine genre is going through a late-life crisis.

Andrew Fox, the guy who wants to buy Maxim, told Page Six, "My vision is to make Maxim a must-have again, using event production, website development, e-commerce, and digital marketing and online programming. I am trying to take a strong brand and give it legs for the future. I would take the magazine and all its digital properties and make it into a $300 million business again."

That sure sounds ambitious! And a bit vague.

But with media industry's current malaise—did Fox happen to read David Carr's rather downbeat Media Equation column in today's New York Times?—and what looks like a genre-deflating decline of men's magazines, it also seems pretty futile.