Call it a silver lining. The steady, years-long decline in newsstand magazine sales appears to have hit a period of relative stasis, according to new findings by magazine industry group MagNet.
North American magazine publishers sold nearly 102 million newsstand units during 2016’s first quarter, representing a 5.1 percent slip in year-over-year revenue from the same period in 2015. While sales are still declining, those losses actually reveal a marked improvement from the 7.6 percent revenue declines North American publishers experienced during 2015’s fourth quarter and the 10.1 percent losses the industry faced during that year’s third quarter.
Larger publishers appeared to take the brunt of the latest losses, with the top ten publishers revealing quarterly declines of 7.4 percent, compared to the 25 publishers (-5.2 percent) and the top 50 and 100 publishers (both -4.6 percent). Still, the top 50 magazine titles, which represent 43 percent of total newsstand magazine sales, saw sales decline by an average of only 7.8 percent, an improvement from the 10.7 decline experienced during the fourth quarter of 2015.
MagNet noted that higher cover prices are at least somewhat responsible for staving off the heavy losses felt in previous quarters: the number of units sold in the last year actual declined by 9.7 percent, according to MagNet data, but higher average cover prices per unit — $5.60, up from $5.32 in the first quarter of 2015 — somewhat mitigated those losses. Leading the charge were special issues, which now sell with an average price of $6.95, or $1.35 more than magazines' average cover price.
Magazines specializing in celebrity, women’s, home/garden, heath/fitness, crafts, sports, teen/children and business/finance continued to perform poorly, while titles focusing on science, recreation, lifestyle and general interest picked up in the first quarter of 2016. Adult coloring books, a new subject category that has taken the consumer world by storm, continues to hold reader interests, with many new releases in that category selling more than 125,000 units at newsstands.
MagNet also noted that current point-of-sale data shows sales in 2016’s 2nd quarter, at least initially, appear too be stronger than Q1.
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