Guest Speaker: Nick Mazur

The Deputy Chief Executive of the Periodical Publisher Association today revealed the wealth of the magazine industry to Falmouth’s first year journalism students.

According to Mr Mazur magazines and business media have an annual turnover of around £7 billion, with the majority of magazines gaining revenue from circulation and advertising.

Consumer magazines tend to rely on their magazines gaining over half of their revenue from circulation (65%) whilst only 35% of revenue comes from advertising.

In contrast business magazines rely heavily on advertising as 82% of revenue comes from this. The remaining 18% is gained from the magazines circulation, a statistic that has changed within the last 10 years.

“10 years ago this was a different picture, as both consumer and business magazines relied equally on advertising and circulation revenue”, explained Mr Mazur.

Mr Mazur then went onto mention that there were around 8,500 magazine titles within the magazine and business media sector 10 years ago. Approximately 5,108 were made up of business magazines, whilst 3,366 were consumer magazines.

Since then the number of magazine titles has increased by 22% over the last decade.

The increase in magazine titles co insides with a 52% rise of consumer’s expenditure on magazines, described by Mr Mazur as, “The changing landscape of the magazine industry”.

The consumer magazine sector has also benefited by this statistic having experienced a growth of 56% over the past five years.

According to Mintel International Group Ltd, who specialise in consumer, media and market research there is an £531 million turnover expected within the consumer magazine sector by 2009.