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a league of their own
Fad, you say? Ever-growing circ says otherwise.
By Jeff Bercovici
Virtually ever since Maxim appeared in the U.S. four years ago and started flying off newsstands, magazine watchers have been asking two questions.
How big would the "lad magazines," as the genre is known in England, get in America?
And how long until the fad wore itself out?
It appears we now have the answers: Not much bigger, and perhaps never.
An important indicator of the growing success of the lads' category came this week when FHM, launched in the wake of Maxim, announced plans for a rate base increase in January that will take it over one million, and Stuff, Maxim's sister publication, said it would boost its rate base to 1.1 million from one million.
Such growth in these times is admirable in itself, but it is of a significance that goes beyond mere numbers, say executives of the two publishing houses.
It is evidence not only that lads' titles are not just a fad but that they have in fact become a category of their own, one apart from traditional American men's magazines.
That’s according to Andy Clerkson, general manager of Stuff, and Dana Fields, executive publisher of FHM.
"I think they're a category," says Clerkson. "All three focus very much on humor, on sexiness, on usefulness. Before Maxim, I think there was a little cynicism on the part of the general American publishing industry in the sense that they felt guys don't read lifestyle magazines. But what guys didn't have was a men's magazine that really kind of mirrored their own lifestyle."
"The conventional wisdom was that there was no such thing as a successful general-interest magazine for men," says Fields. "That turns out to be a lot of bunk."
Also bunk, in Fields' opinion, is the view that easy come means easy go--that Maxim and its kin won't be able to sustain their mass circulations once the novelty of the formula wears off.
Some say this view is substantiated by events in the U.K. market, where FHM and Loaded quickly built up sky-high circulations, only to settle at a somewhat lower level.
But the British precedent doesn’t apply to the U.S., where circulation declines are usually the result of poor-quality subscriptions, such as those acquired through stamp-sheet sweepstakes, argues Fields.
"When you have magazines like FHM that are built on a newsstand base, the subscriptions we have are people that have been converted from newsstand buyers. That’s a healthy subscriber file. That’s not a subscriber file that somebody went out and bought that’s costing them a fortune to maintain."
Moreover, says Clerkson, while FHM may have fallen from its peak of 750,000 or so, the rate base it eventually settled at—650,000—is still huge for the British market, considering that the population of the U.K. is about one-fifth of that of the U.S.
A better parallel, says Fields, can be found in American women’s magazines, where a hot new generation of titles has materialized just as the Seven Sisters appeared to be on the wane.
"I think you see a sea change in the same way that women’s service books had been around forever, their doom had been predicted by no shortage of media buyers, and then came Oprah, Rosie, Martha Stewart," says Fields.
"What it proved is that there’s still an enormous place for magazines that talk to women in a way that is modern and fresh."
Clerkson is leery of the characterization of Maxim as "Cosmo for men," but says that if there’s something lad mags have in common with women’s books, it’s the idea of relevance.
"With guys it really was about talking to guys in their voice that made them relevant," he says. "That’s what men’s magazines in America traditionally didn’t do."
Clerkson says the days of weed-like growth for Stuff and Maxim are more or less over.
"To be honest, I think we’re roughly in the range." Stuff, he says, will probably level off somewhere between 1.1 million and 1.5 million, while Maxim, which now has a rate base of 2.5 million, is unlikely to go higher than three million.
For FHM’s part, says Fields, "I can almost guarantee you we’re looking at somewhere between 1.3 and 1.5 million."
Much higher than that and out-of-pocket costs would be too high for fashion, fragrance and footwear advertisers, she says.
"If you’re going to take the rate base up, you have to be able to charge for it."
October 25, 2001 © 2001 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
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