Bauer Media to shut Zoo Weekly
Bauer Media is closing its struggling Zoo Weekly lads mag and website amid crumbling sales.
The publisher said the October 12 issue will be the magazine’s last, with Bauer blaming “tough retail conditions in the men’s market”.
“Bauer has made the call to close Zoo’s operations. I would like to thank the teams here at Bauer, as well as the advertisers and retailers who have supported the brand,” Bauer CEO David Goodchild said.
Ewen Page, associate publisher for Bauer’s men’s & specialist titles, added: “The staff has done a great job on Zoo Weekly over the years and I commend their work and thank them for their dedication and effort. It is not an easy decision to close a magazine and we have certainly considered all options before coming to this conclusion.”
The closure of Zoo includes the print edition, website and social media content. The move comes just six months after Bauer reopened Zoo’s website after previously “retiring” it.
The print title’s demise is unlikely to be met with surprise within the industry though. Sales collapsed in recent years with Bauer withdrawing the title from the ABC circulation auditing figures in May.
The final quarter of 2014 saw a huge 36 per cent decline in sales to just 24,122 copies sold.
At the time, Bauer rejected suggestions Zoo had been pulled from the audit to avoid ongoing scrutiny over its crumbling circulation or that the publisher was on the verge of axing the struggling magazine. A spokesman said it was withdrawn simply because it was the only publication of its type in the audit and therefore “could not benchmark itself against any other comparative title”.
Zoo Weekly has also incurred the wrath of protest groups who claimed the content promoted a “rape culture”.
Coles last month said it would remove Zoo Weekly from its magazine range with lobby group Collective Shout heralding the move as a win for its campaign urging the supermarket, and rival Woolworths, to ditch the title.
Steve Jones
Hopefully the staff are well catered for and maybe a few will move over to the misfits – they like staff from this sector…
Sad day really, as Zoo was a bit of Fun….
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I thought Zoo had been scrapped months ago
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First Abbott and now Zoo. Soon there will be nothing left to despise.
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Haha Groucho!
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Bauer should have done a much better job, much earlier, of defending some of the outright lies and distortions told about the title by its histrionic opponents. Instead the associate publisher sat firmly on his hands. Despite that, the sales trajectory -admittedly – only had one destination.
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sad day for media diversity and equal voices. Something else to thank the Australia feministas for.
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I always thought the readership claims by RM and EMMA were BS. Now is their chance to prove me wrong, and many others…
Keep Zoo alive in the survey and tell us what next months readership is. If it ain’t zero for Zoo then you guys are bollocks. If you don’t take up this challenge, I’ll think even less of you than I do now, and hopefully some of my media buying brethren will too.
I genuinely want the survey to show zero. I promise you that.
If it shows readers, then I’m all ears as to why, as I’m sure MumBrella readers will be too.
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Wonder if Collective Shout will claim this as a victory after the recent Coles sales withdrawal? Truth be known lads magazines have been in serious decline since young adults and men could access harder edged porn for free online.
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what will boguns with an IQ of sub 47 read now whilst taking a dump?
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Noooo!! Everyone loves Zoo! It’s a really fun magazine, no more offensive than a lingerie catalogue. I feel bad for not buying it as often as I wanted too now… 🙁
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Apparently 24,122 people don’t know how to look-up free porn.
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@dlutzy Yes, it was those pesky feminists that forced the close. Not the fact that nobody was reading the title anymore. Did you even see the last audit numbers? PS: you can find most of Zoo’s “original” content on this thing called the interwebz.
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A bit of fun? Equal voices? This storify compiled by Collective Shout shows why launched our campaign against Zoo.
http://t.co/Zv9Aeb7D39
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Collective Shout will be shouting from the rooftops claiming this victory. However, the content in Zoo Weekly was mild compared to the hardcore content that young men view online.
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@Benross, maybe you can lend them your copy of New Philiosopher.
do you need a high IQ to know how to spell “bogan” or nah?
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The closure is solely related to sales or lack there of and the falling advertising, nothing directly to do with the campaign against the magazine. Lad’s mags have been in a downward spiral for the past 7 years.
It’s an easy propaganda claim of a scalp, but a fiction. Lads mags have disappeared thanks to the internet… far easier to see it for free on your tablet, phone or pc. Hell people are texting/sexting far more graphic images, again for free. Good luck CS killing off that and the internet.
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How will Australia’s men objectify women now without images of scantily clad models and celebrities?
Oh wait. They could just pick up any issue of New Idea, OK or really any female oriented periodical.
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@AnotherAgency.
You DO understand that the readership data from both Morgan and EMMA is a 12-month average issue readership don’t you.
I am sure it will be removed from both data bases, but technically it could stay there for another year.
By the way the high readership of Zoo was largely driven by the high ‘pass-on’ factor, with the pass-on generally accompanied by a phrase along the lines of “Phwaah … have a look at those puppies”.
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Of course I know that, it doesn’t change my point that there’s potential to prove credibility.
It’s the pass-on factor that I find most dubious.
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@MelindaTankardReist – Not that I’ve read the actual paper lately, but back in the day I do recall the Daily Telegraph having pages and pages worth of “adult services” ads.
Have you campaigned for its closure?
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I agree that the pass on factor is massive.
Internationally ‘pass-on’ tends to be higher for young males and in particular for lads, sporting and motoring magazines. Maybe it is more of a ‘perv-on’ factor.
The thing is that ALL magazines in both Morgan and EMMA proceed through exactly the same process (though probably slightly different for each the two services) so the higher pass-on factor is a result of the magazine or the demographic.
Both systems use the international standard of ‘read or looked into for at least two minutes’ I believe. Maybe the two minute minimum is behind it.
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As an avid reader, who will never think about harming a woman and cares more about equality, you people infuriate me. Zoo is better than most of the women’s magazines. The lies spread about the magazine (among other things) just make me ignore anything you ever say. Taking things from men that doesn’t hurt anyone, really is cruel. What has Zoo done to you, really? Show me proof that it is harmful, you can’t!
I am a man diagnosed with ASD and have been buying this magazine since it’s inception. There isn’t anything else similar, without having to buy four separate magazines, what else can I get? Do you want me buying women’s magazines which are just full of hurtful gossip and unrealistic body images, not too mention stories about sex that girls read.
When does equality start and fascist hypocrisy end?
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The young men touch cloth
Now nothing to read taking
A collective shit.
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i was not too kind about Collective Shout’s role in the Zoo shutdown in my News Limited article.
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