Men’s mags stand on the brink of extinction, but what they do matters
With Men’s Style finally succumbing to Bauer's axe, Maxim and GQ are left to mount an unusual last-wicket partnership. Mumbrella’s Adam Thorn, who has worked at more than ten men’s mags in London and Sydney, analyses what’s gone wrong, and why the sector’s contribution to the industry shouldn’t be underestimated
Shortly before I resigned from the British version of men’s fashion magazine Esquire in 2015, the entire editorial team was dragged into a meeting room with our new publisher.
Good news, he said! Despite London’s publishing industry being on the brink of collapse, we’d never been more on-trend. Issues were flying off the shelves like suede sneakers! Website hits were having a moment! And advertisers were practically throwing their unstructured tweed blazers off and grappling each other for vintage double-page spreads! We were, he beamed, an example for others to follow.
Except, that didn’t exactly tally with what I had seen in the previous few months. We’d suffered numerous rounds of redundancies, almost halving the size of the team, had our budgets slashed and our pioneering weekly iPad edition was shut down. A generation of talented young journos and designers were now scraping around for freelance work to pay for their new chinos. All the while, myself and those who survived the culls were working excruciating hours to keep the quality up.
So, in the months that followed, I did some digging, and uncovered the full circulation report (which for mischief’s sake, I’m attaching here). It was true that numbers were holding up remarkably well, but the ways in which its owners made that happen were eye-popping. Of its 64,712 circulation, just 2,231 were sold at full-price on UK and Irish newsstands. That made it, almost certainly, the least successful major publication in the country – something that would have surely come as a surprise to the big-name writers who supported its existence.
How then, did that 2,000 figure inflate so high?
Free and cut-price copies are the main answer. “Monitored free distribution” stood at 18,328 in the UK; “non-controlled free circulation” was 6,774; while, deep breath, “single copy subscription sales at less than 50% basic annual rate but not less than 20%” (gobbledygook that means dirt-cheap subs) stood at 9,503 worldwide.
So-called “bulking” is nothing unusual, but the scale of what was happening here really was. In a nutshell, Esquire was mostly acquired by people who either didn’t buy it, or paid next-to-nothing for it. That is, of course, if they even flicked through the pages at all.
That’s important because it’s the secret model for how men’s magazines are (or were) just about surviving worldwide. Why, then, were marketers swallowing this?
The reason is the very strange way the fashion business works. The big labels, who hire world-class photographers to shoot stunning men and women, don’t generally want their lovely pictures shoved into website banners, instead preferring old-fashioned advertising in print products or out-of-home slots. They care more about who reads them, not how many. Free circulation can guarantee that those of the right stock (aka the beautiful people!) are given the mags – and whether or not the plebs on the street buy them is largely irrelevant.
The problem is that this mirage can only last so long, as the closure of so many big beasts of the men’s mag world shows. Ultimately, there comes a point when nobody actually reading your publication catches up with you, as was surely the case with Men’s Style (a shame for its doubtlessly talented editorial team). And as we head into 2018, those big fashion labels are modernising their marketing plans to boot. Turns out, well-dressed men go online, too.
This is a tragedy because men’s magazines have, and still do, produce some of the best journalism in the world. They provide a rare mix of hard reporting, writing, design, photography and interviewing – often all in the same feature. The rise of new journalism, pioneered by Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese in the pages of US Esquire in the Sixties, revolutionised feature writing, while British lads’ mag Loaded won a glut of awards and reintroduced gonzo with its mad take on Nineties culture. To its detractors, it was silliness aimed at pissed-up twentysomethings, but it still regularly ran long-form articles that didn’t shy away from asking tough questions, or showing a complete disregard for PR teams, all delivered with a dry humour now absent from the industry.
And it’s not just a phenomenon restricted to the US and the UK – a few months ago I found myself on a night out with the old editorial team of now-defunct Aussie lads’ mag Ralph, and you won’t find a bunch more passionate about good journalism. It was an age where team members who came up with a good ideas were told to get on a plane and come back with a story.
Where then, does this leave Australia’s last stand in newsagents – now largely restricted to an unusual double wicket partnership of Maxim and GQ Australia (where, full disclosure, I worked previously)?
They face the unenviable task of moving their readership online, while keeping their advertising paymasters happy in print and attempting to deliver good journalism in an age where men have moved off into their different niches. And with budgets tightening, funding those great pieces is becoming harder and harder.
The answer, I believe, is to attempt to emulate the American version of GQ which, in my view, is still the pound-the-pound best publication in the world – and anyone in need of convincing need only read Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s interview with Tom Hiddleston, already talked of in hushed tones as one of the best profiles ever written. Only top-notch journalism, and not a desperate dash to rehash second-hand news stories online, can save the industry.
But Taffy’s article also shows why men’s magazines matter in 2017. They deliver smart articles in plain English, without pretensions, to ordinary men.
And in a world of fourth-wave feminism, mansplaining and #metoo, blokes need a guiding hand in life more than ever before.
He’s right, I do think men need quality publications to help them navigate the world. They just won’t be printed on glossy paper
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Excellent article Adam! But there are still some great online men’s lifestyle magazines that are burgeoning in Australia that didn’t necessarily start in print – D’marge, Executive Style, Time+Tide and our own Man of Many (https://manofmany.com) to name a few. There’s certainly still a place for the profund long-form men’s journalism you speak of.
There are great sites that cater for this market and offer daily EDMs.
D’Marge is my personal favourite and is entirely local…
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I think sometimes these publications are out of touch with the bulk of their audience. There’s a difference between aspirational and attainable. Men’s Health walks this line on a monthly basis – proclaiming to let you know how to “lose fat fast” from a male model who spends 5 hours a day at the gym.
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This is bollocks. How is there no mention of Men’s Health, which has dominated men’s mags for like 20yrs or so? It may have lost some numbers in the last few years, but it was a 4x the size of the others last time I looked.
And as for blogs/influencers, I’d rather know when an ad is an ad.
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Isn’t Men’s Health a fitness/health mag? The name says it all. Different readership, different advertisers.
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I was all set to find out why such magazines mattered, and the answer was, an interview with an actor best known for playing a comic strip character, and the need for “a guiding hand” to be found within its pages. Well, I won’t have the benefit of the guiding hand now. But then, as so often happens, I only first heard of this august journal when its closure was announced.
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Totally agree. Men’s Health is solid. In some of these segments, it’s about being the ‘last man standing’ and owning the space like Men’s Health. This is also Rupert’s strategy of ensuring his print products are the last remaining ones.
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Do people really want to spend all their days viewing tiny nuggets of unactionable emotion? If so, journalism is doomed.
If not, then the long form producers need to find ways into people’s phones that pays them money.
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Paying $15 for a book of ads that tell you you’re a loser if you don’t have a $2,000 cardigan was never appealing for the bulk of guys; the only male targeted magazines to deliver high reach had women in bikinis on the cover.
This industry wide delusion that print is not dead needs to stop. The amazing cultural contributions listed in this article are 50 and 20 years old. Anyone born since these glory days reads this stuff on their phone.
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Maybe the fact that people think mags like Men’s Health and mags like Men’s Style had vastly different readerships is part of the problem. Sales teams never worked out that people who work out and are into fitness might be really into fashion because, you know, they look good in clothes too. A lack of imagination that nobody could convince high-value advertisers to invest in the fitness market.
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Lets be blunt, surprised they lasted so long. A lot of these magazines existed because fashion brands and media planners kept playing along. Dodgy circulation games mean audience metrics are likely to be a crock, and ROI for campaigns very low.
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Congratulations! Is there an insider at Mumbrella that can leak the sale price so you can publish it?
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Congratulations and thanks for a refreshingly honest and candid article about your experience. Great stuff. And we look forward to more great news and events from Team Mumbrella.
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Man of Many? 40% US readership according to SimilarWeb, less than 9% Aussie readership, this is not “burgeoning in Australia” by any stretch, it’s a clear sign of click-hungry articles with minimal appeal to Aussie readers.
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Men’s Health is one of the better ‘men’s lifestyle’ magazines because it has an actual base of common reader interest but expands from that to a sensible set of related topics, and it’s had the benefit of solid editors and journalists behind it.
Here’s the thing: you can’t just say you are a “men’s lifestyle” magazine or website or blog, because there is no such thing as a singular “men’s lifestyle”. You have to start with a solid foundation of a real and sufficiently broad interest – health is the best one – and then add on related content which those readers will find appealing. This is why so many “men’s lifestyle” websites and blogs have very incredibly low Australian readership but survive as vacuous grabs for advertising booked by lazy media buyers.
Even so, health-based mens’ titles are not finding life as easy these days. In the US, Men’s Fitness has been folded into its sibling Men’s Journal, and MJ is actually the better for it now, once again because this gives it a more unifying focus for content and readership.
I spent a lot of time looking at Australian men’s lifestyle blogs in the second half of 2017 and websites like D’Marge, Man of Many, EFTM, Hey Gents etc are generally pretty lazy and when you look at their traffic you can see how many are basically pulling the wool over media buyers’ eyes.
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Adam, your experience with Esquire UK is far from uncommon. There are many instances of similar circ-boosting plays in the Australian market and even worse. In the decade before it was sold to Bauer, ACP would prop up the circ of many market-leading titles by buying copies themselves and then warehousing them. The magazine’s own marketing budget would be spent purchasing ‘grace’ copies so they could be included in the circ reports and thus maintain that magazine’s market-leading position and justify its high ad rates. If you look back at the biggest circ drops of many premium ACP titles those often happened not only due to a native sales slump but mark the period when this strategy was abandoned, and pulling away those props meant an instant drop of 10k-20k for some mags!
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Hi Cam,
As the founder of Man of Many, we’ve had huge growth in our Aussie audience (+200% in the last 12 months). Despite the lower percentages (largely due to the sheer size of the US being 12x a larger market than Australia), we remain the highest ranked men’s website on Alexa.com in Australia.
We’re also producing much more locally focused content so would welcome your feedback on what sorts of things you’d like to see or read and we’ll try integrate this more into our articles.
If you do some simple math on the SimilarWeb numbers, the estimated Aussie traffic is still higher than most of our competitors despite it only being listed as 10% of our traffic.
Cheers,
Scott