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for Teen magazine
Ailing Primedia shutters circulation-losing title
Just three years ago there was a widespread belief that the category of magazines for teenage girls could expand infinitely to accommodate a boomlet in that demographic, and expand it did with the launch of Teen People and a slew of other titles.
Now the category is contracting.
Teen magazine, the fourth largest title, with a rate base of 1.58 million, is being folded by Primedia following a dramatic 23 percent drop in circulation in the last half of 2001.
Its May issue will be its last.
Primedia, which is hemorrhaging losses and selling off assets to stem them, says that folding the long-struggling Teen will allow it to focus energy and resources on Seventeen, the leading title in the category, with a circulation of 2.3 million.
Primedia picked up Teen as part of its acquisition last year of Emap USA, but even then it was known that the title was deeply troubled and not likely to survive.
Numerous makeovers over the years, even before the flush of new contenders, had failed to revive the title, and last year it fell from the No. 3 title to No. 4 when the four-year-old Teen People grew past it, behind Seventeen and Gruner + Jahr's YM.
Teen's most recent makeover, completed last summer, took the title away from the traditional format of advice and celebrity profiles to concentrate on fashion and shopping, lots of shopping, in an effort to capture the success of Time Inc.'s InStyle and Condé Nast's Lucky.
The makeover failed to take hold.
Teen's faltering was especially severe at the newsstand. In the first half of 2001 single-copy sales fell 32.6 percent versus the period a year earlier. In the second half they were off 33 percent.
Seventeen has been in an intense circulation battle with No. 2 YM, with a circulation of 2.2 million. Both publications have experienced flat growth and declining newsstand sales as they struggled against the flush of new contenders, and their woes have only been exacerbated by the sagging ad economy.
Seventeen's ad pages were down 7.73 percent last year to 1,335.8, and its revenue was flat at $112 million, according to the PIB.
Teen People was flat in pages last year with 1,050.5 and up 14 percent in ad dollars, with $76.7 million.
YM had a banner year on the strength of a redesign by editor Annemarie Iverson, now at Seventeen, but it wasn't enough to catch up to Teen People. YM's pages were up 38.4 percent to 764.3, and revenue was up almost 50 percent to $68 million.
Teen actually saw modest increases last year in both pages (up 8.2 percent to 620.4) and revenue (up 2.5 to $43.7 million).
But the magazine's prospects were looking increasingly grim. Its narrow focus on shopping may have set it apart from Seventeen and YM, but not from Teen Vogue and Elle Girl, new entries from Condé Nast and Hachette, respectively.
Meanwhile, Primedia, loaded down with debt following the acquisition of Emap USA, has been forced to cut wherever it can. It recently sold Modern Bride to Condé Nast for a reported $52 million.
March 4, 2002 © 2002 Media Life
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