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glut of teen mags
As some bop might others drop? Who will falter?
By Lisa Schneider
The last several years have witnessed an explosion in the number of magazines aimed at teenage girls. You know?
New titles, including Teen People, Cosmogirl, Elle Girl and Teen Vogue, have joined Seventeen, YM and Teen in telling high school-aged girls how to act, what to buy and whom to obsess about.
The segment has certainly begun to look saturated, but publishers have justified each new launch with the same two arguments:
A: The current generation of teens, sometimes called Generation Y or the Echo Boom, is the largest ever.
B: Teenage girls are insatiable consumers who will buy three or more magazines if they feel like it.
Now, after a year of recession, distribution disruptions, and slack advertising sales, those arguments will be put to the test.
Indeed, it has already begun.
The teen category as a whole was suffering even before Sept. 11, particularly in the area of newsstand sales.
Seventeen, the oldest and traditionally most popular teen magazine, had 18.4 percent fewer single copy sales in the first half of 2001 than in 2000.
Teen Magazine’s single copy sales for the same period declined 32.6 percent, while Cosmo Girl’s declined 15.9 percent, and YM’s fell 5.6 percent.
These declines are attributable in part to the convulsions of the magazine wholesaling distribution business, which last year translated into lower-than-expected single copy sales for many major titles.
But they also represent evidence that overcrowding in the teen market may have reached unsustainable levels, say some publishers.
Laura McEwen, publisher of Gruner + Jahr’s 45-year-old YM, predicts that the upcoming year will be one of consolidation, making things difficult for all but the strongest players.
“The younger books, I think, will struggle,” says McEwen. “[Advertisers] want to be in the books that cover the entire market, so there’s not a need to be in the other titles.”
“Only the strong will survive,” agrees Teen People publisher Annie Zehren.
The Time Inc. title got its first taste of adversity when circulation, which had been growing at a dizzying rate ever since Teen People launched, dipped 3.6 percent to 1,611,579 in the first half of 2001, with newsstand sales sliding 16.4 percent to 565,000.
Zehren denies that the magazine has hit a plateau but acknowledges, “No other category was as competitive as ours.”
On the advertising front, teen publishers, who have been affected somewhat less by the slowdown than their counterparts in other quarters of the magazine world, say that 2002 is shaping up to be a decent-to-good year.
“The category is down in ad pages, but that’s the whole market,” says Linda Platzner, publisher of Primedia’s Seventeen and Teen Beat. “I’m over-budget for both books this season.”
Ad pages in Seventeen were down 7.7 percent to 1,335.8 in 2001.
McEwen says YM, which is coming off the strongest year in its history, is expecting ad sales to stay strong through 2002, with pages in the March issue up 22 percent over last year. YM’s pages were up 38.4 percent to 764.3 in 2001.
Teen People was flat in pages last year, with 1,050.5 through December. Zehren says she expects the first half of 2002 to be “fairly tough” for Teen People and the industry as a whole, but she looks forward to a recovery in the third or fourth quarter.
But will that be soon enough for vulnerable new franchises like Elle Girl and Teen Vogue—or will the companies that publish them elect to cut their losses?
Elle Girl publisher Linda Mason says Hachette Filipacchi has not changed its plans to put out the new title as a quarterly in 2002.
“We’ve been extremely pleased with the way the launch issue was received by the audience,” says Mason.
She denies the suggestion that the Elle spinoff is little more than a latecomer to an already jam-packed teen publishing party.
“Elle Girl differentiates itself by catering to the older, more fashion-conscious teen.”
Seventeen’s Platzner speculates on whether Teen Vogue will remain in the market, but says, “I don’t see any others going away.”
January 15, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
-Lisa Schneider is a New York writer and a contributor to Media Life.
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