Canadian Living and Canadian House & Home are top newsstand performers

As someone who has complained long and hard about the dearth of good, consistent Canadian magazine industry data, I want to acknowledge the good data that we do get. I would include in that the annual revenue rankings of Masthead and the annual tally of single copy sales that the distributor Coast to Coast publishes. It gives us an excellent opportunity to see where things stand and, sometimes, it's not a pretty picture. For one thing, it demonstrates the overwhelming domination of that precious retail real estate by spillover titles from U.S. publishers.

The Canadian Newsstand Boxscore, now in its third year, ranks the top 2,000 publications -- Canadian, U.S. and foreign -- by total unit sales and dollars.

At first glance it is obvious that only 5 of the top 25 titles by 2008 sales are Canadian-published and one of those, Hello! is really a franchise, a partnership between Rogers Publishing under license from a Spanish company. Hello!, in the box score, is Canada's highest selling single copy seller by total copies, with just over 3 million copies annually. Compare that with the next largest Canadian title, Canadian Living, with 1.4 million.

Similarly, the top-selling magazine in the country would appear to be People magazine, which sells twice as many copies (6.2 million) as Hello! and 10 times as many copies as Maclean's or Chatelaine.

But you get a much different picture if you rework this valuable data another way, in terms that (in my opinion) make comparison even more meaningful. By comparing the published annual sales and revenue figures for newsstands with titles' own published data for frequency, rankings shift substantially and Canadian titles do much better, even though they continue to be swamped by U.S. competitors.

For instance, Cosmopolitan is actually Canada's top seller, moving twice as many magazines per issue as People. And Canadian Living and Canadian House & Home rank 6th and 7th rather than 15th and 16th and outstrip Hello! which, far from being Canada's top-seller, is 21st, rather than 9th in terms of per-issue newsstand sales.

Here is the re-crunched 2008 data:

	Per issue	Copies	Dollars
1	Cosmopolitan	230,550	$ 1,287,797
2	People	126,319	$ 635,758
3	O Oprah Magazine	99,202	$ 570,409
4	Maxim	74,116	$ 456,976
5	In Style	76,021	$ 455,369
6	Canadian Living	116,074	$ 429,661
7	Canadian House & Home	65,144	$ 387,605
8	Star	76,151	$ 376,672
9	In Touch	125,664	$ 375,736
10	Men's Health	56,542	$ 338,685
11	Woman's World	147,241	$ 331,291
12	Vanity Fair	56,643	$ 317,903
13	Hustler Canada	24,395	$ 311,769
14	Style At Home Group	53,664	$ 301,227
15	US Weekly	59,931	$ 287,071
16	National Enquirer	60,647	$ 286,589
17	First For Women	89,228	$ 266,790
18	Glamour	53,260	$ 265,766
19	People Style Watch	46,590	$ 232,482
20	Life & Style	69,850	$ 208,853
21	Hello	59,417	$ 197,831
22	OK Magazine	38,575	$ 153,916
23	Globe	32,409	$ 153,048
24	The Economist Group	9,607	$ 72,054
25	Maclean's	9,285	$ 58,760