Lads mags suffer tumbling sales, despite more nudity
Friday, 17 August 2007
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Fears that the scantily-clad bottom has fallen out of the "lads mag" market appeared to have come true yesterday as it emerged that both monthly and weekly men's magazines suffered a huge slump in sales over the past six months.
Loaded, published by IPC Media, one of the first monthly men's publications to dominate the trade during the peak of the genre's popularity in the second half of the 1990s, was the worst hit, losing a quarter of its circulation in just half a year.
ABC circulation figures for the first six months of 2007 showed that other mainstays of the lad's mag market, including FHM, Maxim and rival weeklies Nuts and Zoo were also hit by a significant drop in sales.
Nuts, which is also owned by IPC, saw its sales fall by 6 per cent while the circulation of rival Zoo, owned by FHM publishers Emap, dropped by an 8.7 per cent.
FHM, the traditional leader in the men's monthly market, despite remaining the best seller, saw a year-on-year downturn of 26 per cent.
The continued decline in sales of weekly magazines is particularly bad news for an industry that had hoped they would be the saviours of men's magazines.
Yesterday's figures were a far cry from the heyday of the 1990s when lad's mags dominated male readership.
Loaded, founded by a former deputy editor of the New Musical Express in 1994, came to symbolise the genre and attracted a wide readership through its tongue-in-cheek journalism and ability to persuade celebrities to dispense with most of their clothes for photo shoots. But as sales dropped, many critics accused men's magazines of increasingly dumbing down and resorting to greater levels of nudity in a bid to halt the slide. The internet is believed to be responsible for the drop in sales as more and more men go to the web to view scantily clad women.
Esquire, which has been relaunched in "manbag" size, is one of the few men's titles to have recorded a slight increase in circulation - up 2 per cent to 53,537.
