The UK has long served as a sort of farm league for magazine concepts, with the best ideas graduating to America. 
  Now two of Britain’s biggest magazine companies believe they have discovered the next hit format: weekly men’s titles, heavy on sports and humor.
   Nuts, from IPC, debuts next week, with Emap’s Zoo Weekly following at the end of the month. Barring a pair of obvious flops, it won’t be long before one of these publishers, or someone else, tries to export the formula to the U.S.
  When they do, they’ll likely be disappointed, say a number of U.S. magazine executives.
  Unlike beer-and-babes and celebrity gossip, this is one genre they say won’t survive an Atlantic crossing, and for a number of reasons.
  A leading one is the difference in size between the two markets. With roughly five times the population, the U.S. requires vastly greater resources for a national launch. And launching a weekly is hugely expensive to begin with, notes Chip Block, vice chairman of USApubs.com, a subscriptions marketing company.
   “Publishing a weekly where you lose money is like printing money in reverse,” he says.
  It’s thus crucial to build circulation as quickly as possible, and the best way to do that is with newsstand presence.
   But newsstands don’t have nearly the reach in the U.S. that they do in the UK, especially among men, says Ed Needham, a Brit who launched the U.S. version of FHM and now edits Rolling Stone.
   “In Britain, the actual exposure to magazines is so great. Everybody kind of walks past stacks of magazines several times a day,” he says. “Weekly magazines here are very much bought by women at supermarket checkouts.”
  “The issue is where do you put the magazines,” agrees consultant Steve Rosenfield of the Media Resource Group. “Twenty-year-old guys don’t frequent anywhere that they come into contact with magazines.”
   In coming up with the prototype for Us Weekly, Terry McDonell used Heat, a British celebrity magazine, as a template. But McDonell, who now edits Sports Illustrated, questions whether general news could have the same appeal for male readers that celebrity news has for women.
   Still, if Nuts and Zoo Weekly succeed in the U.K., he expects to see them imported to or imitated in the U.S. “The influence of whatever’s working at the moment can’t be overstated,” he says.
   Moreover, against the risks of failing in the U.S., publishers must weigh the possibility that someone else will try it first and succeed. That logic, if nothing else, will impel Time Inc.-owned IPC and Emap to rush ahead with American versions of the new titles.
   “I’ve got to assume that around this very fast-moving planet of ours, there will be publishing executives in America and Australia and other English-speaking territories who will be looking very closely at what happens with men’s weeklies in this country,” says Mike Soutar, editorial director of IPC and a former editor in chief of Maxim’s U.S. edition. 
   “From my experience in the U.S. market, I would feel pretty certain that Nuts, recast with an American accent, is the kind of idea that would probably translate well.”
   “It’s in the back of our mind,” says Dharmash Mistry, head of consumer media at Emap. “Providing there are elements of it which are expandable, you want to get it out internationally as soon as possible.”
   Both acknowledge that the hurdles to success are far higher in the U.S. than at home.
   “A weekly is logistically much more difficult simply because America doesn’t have the same scale of newsstand culture that the U.K. does,” says Soutar.
   “There’s a bit of a barrier there, but it’s not insurmountable,” adds Mistry.
   In this case, however, it could well prove to be.
   “I think it’s totally insane,” says Block. “But then I was wrong about the laddie magazines.”