Women's Media: Gettin' Mighty Crowded
By Frank Saxe MEDIA POST

Browse the women’s magazine section at your favorite newsstand and you will be amazed at how many titles fill the shelf. The old favorites like Cosmo and Good Housekeeping, are still there. But there’s a whole new crop of titles fighting for readers’, and advertisers’, attention.

Next March Lifetime cable network will launch its monthly magazine with Hearst. This month Oxygen is upping the ante by playing its trump card – Oprah Winfrey – with a prime time show. At the same time, there are an increasing number of channels vying for women’s attention on television — no surprise, really, since women watch more TV than men. The surprise is that even during an advertising downturn, the sector has held steady, and has even grown to some extent. It’s clear that to programmers, publishers, and marketers, women are still the demographic of choice. But in terms of readership and viewership, the category shows some disturbing trends.

It has been a mixed year for many women’s magazine titles. On the one hand, circulation figures posted their worst showing in five years. One industry analyst blames the continued decline of Publishers Clearing House and American Family Publishers, which had fueled sales for years. Among the women’s titles with the biggest circulation decreases are Self; O, The Oprah Magazine; and Rosie. On the other hand, Vogue had its best September book since 1989. Elle’s ad pages were down 11.5% in the same month.Yet all three of those magazines posted higher advertising revenues. Rosie, for instance, saw its billings surge 135% in the first six months of the year, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.

In the first half, the number of ad pages for all magazines dropped 9%, while revenues were essentially flat.Few titles appear on the brink of extinction, yet with so many magazines on the newsstand today, many believe a shakeout is coming in the next year.

“We’re in a shakeout,” says Greenwich, CT-based branding consultant Jack Trout. “We’re in a segmenting market where you have new players, and you don’t have a lot of growth in the ad business, so you have more players chasing fewer dollars, and that makes for a shakeout.” Read more