U.S. enthusiast titles are hard hit

It's sometimes a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't...magazine publishers have gravitated in recent years to specialized niches because they thought it gave them an edge, but now the very specialized nature of their subject matter and the dimensions of their niche could be working against them, according to a story in MediaDaily News.

Enthusiast magazines, particularly those with large male audiences, are seeing a significant drop in single copy sales, ad pages and ad dollars.

In a survey of 25 smaller publications covering a range of topics, including titles like Bassmaster, Cycle World, Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, Outside, Salt Water Sportsman, Skiing, and Transworld Skateboarding, newsstand sales and ad revenue were all down--often with double-digit losses.

Tellingly, total ad pages for the group actually rose 7 percent as ad revenue dropped 14.5 percent, indicating an overall devaluation of ad space. Meanwhile, publications for which PIB [Publishers Information Bureau] data wasn't available--including Bike, Canoe & Kayak, Dirt Rider, Flex, Game & Fish Magazine, Hot Bike, and Four Wheeler Magazine--all posted big declines in both newsstand sales and subscriptions.

Special interest titles like Motorboating saw a 27.9 percent drop at the newsstand, 20.5 percent in ad pages, and 16.2 percent in revenue. A study from Mediamark Research Inc. (MRI) found in spring 2006 that boating titles lost 1 million readers--or about 18 percent of their audience--since spring 2005.

"It's very simple," says Samir Husni, the chair of the journalism department at the University of Mississippi, and an expert on magazines. "The more specialized your titles and the more specialized your area of interest, the more of that information you can find on an Internet site or a specialized cable channel." Husni said magazines must either have "really mass readership" or "a very small circulation--say, 5,000 people who want to read about a very obscure topic." "You can't survive in the middle ground," he says, "because you're getting to an area where people can just Google it."

On a happier note, 47 new magazines were launched in the U.S. in the third quarter, an increase of 34.3% over last year for the same time period: 17 lifestyle titles; 14 magazines for the affluent sector; 13 magazines for men; 12 magazines for women, and nine new titles targeting African-Americans.