Overview of magazine industry

There are more than 8000 titles published in britain which can be categorised as follows:

Consumer (general & specialist) sold in newsagents and available online
Business/trade/professional/ B2B - for people at work.
Customer magazines that organisations to give their customers as a form of marketing
Staff magazines to inform staff about their company
Newspaper supplements- come free as part of daily or sunday paper
Part work- a set number of issues build up into an 'encyclopaedia' on specific topics
Academic journals- for university-level discussion of all sorts of arcane topics

Consumer magazine make up the bulk of the titles for sale newagents.

They may be general titles that aim to entertain and inform (such as Loaded, Elle, Radio Times)

Or consumer magazine publishers (By 2008) sales revenue in newsagents)

Bauer publishing 25%

IPC media 20%

BBC 7.8%

National magazine company 7.3%

Update: Immediate media bought out BBC magazines in october 2011

Today in the UK:

There are over 3200 different consumer (in 1980 there were only 1383)
1.4 billions magazines are sold each year (it was 2.1 billion in 19070 and 1.2 billion in 1992)
85% of the population reads a magazine
Advertisers spent £2 billion on magazine annually
An average of 500 new magazines have been launched every year in the past decade
Only 3 in 10 titles survive for more than 4 years.

Top 5 women's monthly magazines 2013

Glamour

Cosmopolitan

Yours

Woman & Home

Good housekeeping


Top 5 childeren's & teen magazines 2013

Moshi Monsters magazine

Fun to learn - Peppa pig

Fun to learn - Friends

CBeebies art

Top of the pops


Top 4 men's lifestyle magazines

Men's health

Nuts

FHM

GQ