| 'The field has gotten much more competitive, and the stakes have gotten that much higher. Five years ago, a successful magazine had sales of $20 million a year. Now it’s more like $50 million.' |
very success brought its demise
Spawned imitators with far deeper pockets
By Jeff Bercovici
Looking back, Drew Massey can consider himself, in some measure, the agent of his own undoing.
To hear him tell it, he was in large part responsible for creating one of the fastest-growing categories in magazines today—a category so successful that his own magazine just couldn’t keep up.
"We were the first young men’s title in the marketplace when we started five years ago," says Massey, trying to sound casual but speaking at auctioneer speed. "Back then it was just ourselves and Details."
Massey’s magazine is P.O.V., which announced this week that the February issue will be its last.
In addition to P.O.V. and Details, young men’s titles, or lads magazines, as they’re called in the U.K., include such books as Maxim, Stuff and FHM, the last of which will debut on this side of the Atlantic in March.
Note that this category, as defined by Massey, emphatically does not include GQ and Esquire, which are, in his view, more akin to dads magazines.
"Since then, a dozen other magazines have joined the fray," continues Massey.
"The field has gotten much more competitive, and the stakes have gotten that much higher. Five years ago, a successful magazine had sales of $20 million a year. Now it’s more like $50 million."
He’s not kidding. Maxim parlayed its tight t-shirts shots and "How to score babes" stories into ad sales of $38 million in the first 11 months of 1999—a 209 percent improvement over sales for the same period the previous year, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.
Those are high stakes indeed for a little guy like P.O.V., whose circulation was a mere 360,000. By comparison, Maxim has a circulation of 1.2 million.
Details, of course, has been in a perpetual identity crisis ever since then-editor James Truman successfully relaunched it 10 years ago.
However, despite changing editors like underwear—the most recent is ex-Maxim editor Mark Golin—Details has managed to hold its circulation more-or-less steady at around 500,000.
P.O.V. was fast losing ground against the competition, its ad pages falling by 13 percent in 1999, and costing its parent company, Freedom Communications, an estimated $12 million over the last four years.
It finally got to the point where Freedom, unwilling to dump more millions into the title, chose to fold P.O.V., along with Egg, the quarterly nightlife title that Massey and company had bought from the late Malcolm Forbes. Attempts to sell them were brief and unsuccessful.
Massey sees a war brewing between the remaining players on the still-crowded field, with prosperity ahead for those titles that survive the shakedown.
"The category is going to continue to proliferate and grow, but there’s going to be a lot of slugging in the near future," he says.
Massey himself is heading off to the greener pastures of new media. "There’s a much higher payoff online," says Massey. "You can take $50 million and turn it into a billion."
His next venture will be a website called LiveLarge.com. It will be "a 20-something portal, leveraging on our strength in that area."
Supported by both advertising and e-commerce, LiveLarge will be a resource for professional young guys who know how to party, with the same work hard-play hard philosophy that distinguished P.O.V., says Massey. He declined to give further details.
-Je
ff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.