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Personal Finance
Yet another fatality of lingering advertising slump
By Jeff Bercovici
The stumbling stock market and feeble economy have claimed the life of yet another investing magazine.
Bloomberg LP, the business information company founded by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, is shutting down Bloomberg Personal Finance.
The 6-year-old title is at least the fifth financial advice magazine to go out of business over the past two years.
While Bloomberg continues to publish several other investing titles including Bloomberg Markets and Bloomberg Wealth Manager, those are aimed at finance professionals, not consumers.
The staff of Bloomberg Personal Finance, which published 10 issues a year and had a circulation of 400,000, will be absorbed elsewhere within the company.
With the exception of technology publications and in-flight magazines, personal finance has been the hardest hit of any magazine category by the recession of the past two years. Ad pages for the category were down by average of around 25 percent in 2001 and another 12 percent last year.
Meanwhile, the stock market's flailings have apparently hurt consumer interest in financial news, as reflected in falling newsstand sales for investing magazines and depressed ratings for financial news TV shows.
The category has been in contraction mode since 2001, when three personal finance titles went out of business: Meredith Corp.'s Family Money, Consumer’s Digest’s Your Money and Individual Investor. Kiplinger’s Personal Finance got a boost from Individual Investor’s demise, buying its 430,000-strong subscriber list, while Time Inc. bought the circulation lists of Your Money and Consumer’s Digest.
The following year saw the biggest casualty yet when Time Inc. shut down the 825,000-circulation Mutual Funds in October 2002.
Time Inc.’s other finance magazine, Money, leads the category with a circulation of nearly 2 million, but its single-copy sales, which account for less than 10 percent of total circulation, were down 18.6 percent in the first half of 2002, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
Money also had the most ad pages of any monthly finance title in 2002, but its 919.2 pages represented a 13.9 percent drop from the previous year, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.
Worth, SmartMoney, Kiplinger’s and Barron’s, which is a weekly, all saw ad page drops of 10 percent or more last year.
January 13, 2003© 2003 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
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