Yet another down year for magazines

medialife reporting:
Heading into 2012, magazines hadn’t seen a year-over-year gain in ad pages since 2005.
That didn’t change last year.
For the seventh straight year, ad pages declined for the industry, down 8.2 percent, from 164,190.17 to 150,698.57 during 2012, according to new data from the Publishers Information Bureau.
Including Sunday magazine totals, ad pages were off 8.2 percent from 168,711.64 to 154,838.29.
That included a 7.2 percent decline in fourth quarter, the smallest decline for the year.
Certainly the economy hasn’t helped the industry. Last year marked the steepest magazine ad page decline since 2009, when the country was in the depths of the recession and pages plummeted 25.6 percent.
In 2012, with uncertainty over the European debt crisis and the looming fiscal cliff weighing heavily on consumers, advertisers cut back across a number of media. Magazines were impacted greatly, following a more moderate 3.1 percent decline in 2011.
But the economy isn’t entirely to blame for magazines’ woes. You have to go back to 2005 to see any ad page gains, and even then it was a modest 0.5 percent.
New media is responsible for some of the decline, whether it’s siphoning off ad dollars that would have otherwise gone to magazines or prompting the closure of some print editions, such as Motorboating, which went online-only last year. That alone led to the loss of almost 336 ad pages.
More such losses will come this year. Newsweek, which had 788.37 ad pages last year and was one of the few titles to gain, has gone online-only, and more titles are expected to follow.
Fifty-one magazines, or 23 percent of the 219 tracked by the PIB, saw ad page gains last year.
Reader’s Digest Large Edition saw the biggest ad page gains for the year, up 30.9 percent. Ebony was second with a gain of 22.9 percent.
The biggest decline was for Spa magazine, down 81.8 in 2012. Spa shut down last February.
Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel, Renovation Style, Spin and Sporting News all saw steep declines of 54 percent or more, but again those were due in part to limited publication or closures as well.
 ...
MH: lots of statistics here:
http://www.medialifemagazine.com/yet-another-down-year-for-magazines/