Overview of Magazine Industry

AS Media – Magazine Industry

While researching and gathering information for my magazine, I have been learning about the Magazine Industry generally. In Particular, Magazine Companys like Time Inc (Previously IPC)  who is owned by Time Warner and magazines a like are who I have been reading and researching about.

As an industry, it’s highly demanded with a high popularity of readers wanting separate Magazines that each intrest those audiences. Time Warner is a multi-national buisness that own Time Inc and publish the magazine. This helps Time Inc with profits, money and advertisement oppotunitys to help grow the magazine itself not just for the Audience but for other companies.

Previously named IPC, the brand dates back to around the early 60s (Specifically 1963) when the International Publishing Corporation was created that was a holding company for the famous “The Mirror” Newspaper, thus creating numerous amounts of the UK’s Biggest magazine publishers. 5 years later, the IPC/Time Inc magazines were introduced to the Magazine market. As one of the most popular Magazine Companies, the decline of published magazine has hit hard mainly for the fact that Technology has become such a phenomenon in the world that now you can watch and view magazine via technology rather than by paper magazine that you would buy online. Although this has been a major hit to the magazine industry, Time Inc is still working well and fully functinal but there is no doubt that there is a worry that the Industry may completely crash because of such a rapid loss of marketting, especially as it was reported in August 2014 Time Inc had made $32 Million net loss. Again this was all mainly to do with technology, the beginning of the losses started when the Internet was first introduced in which NME launched NME.com as computers were starting to majorly affect the industry. Another downfall was when Custom consumer products were introduced, things such as Magazine created by the public itself that were put online and were readable for free was a huge difference maker as this allowed people to be creative, unique and experimental without having a huge profit loss, it was a genuine no lose situation which alerted the bigger companies that had to make a big difference to their Magazines.  Furthermore, social networks have exploded through the years, it seems as if most Magazines have gone out of fashion and Social Networks like Facebook, Twitter and especially Youtube (For blogging and posting videos) has set the bar that Magazine Companies have needed to reach or beat. Ironically though, these Social Networks have been a treat to companies like Time Inc/NME as this allowed them for the public to speak their opinion on what should be changed, improved and what is liked/disliked meaning the  Magazines could be improved  via the Social Network. In general, technology has worked in both ways, for good and for bad.

Even though these big hits in losses have happened, Time Warner (Formely AOL) are huge company that are cope well with these losses as they companies such as Warner Bros, the huge Kids programme “Cartoon Network”, IPC Media and of course Time Magazine itself. This allows them to make up these losses by benefiting with advertisements on the cross companies which can influence and attract lots of audiences from different companies that Time Warner own. This spreads the awareness of the Magazine in the hope of more sales, a clever way of invested companies helping out others such as Time Inc. Unfortunately though, with this in mind this still doesn’t always solve the case, it may mend it but it does completely heal the losses. Confirmation of the Magazine Industry was noticed when reports of Time Warner wanting to sell their share of the Magazine Companies but the deal fell through because of a disagreement.

This all entitles to one question, is the Magazine Industry close to dying out or is it slowly dying out? And will the Magazine Industry ever be as popular as it use to be?

Various companies are still on the decline so the answer is looking more inevitable or may be Magazines will have to start being published online rather than being sold as paper prints.