Photographic magazine sales in 2015

Sales of photographic magazines in UK continue to fall. I last reported here the circulation figures for photographic magazines in 2013. Sales for all fell. That downward trend has continued and again in 2015 the circulation of all photographic magazines audited by ABC in UK decreased.

I know that the number of titles stocked by our local W.H. Smith has also fallen. I haven’t been able to find Advanced Photographer (not audited ABC) for months. The professional photographic journalists who edit and write the magazines must continue to be very worried. For example, Amateur Photographer sales have fallen by 19% in two years. They are only 14% of what they were 30 years ago, such has been the decline.

Magazine sales suffer is because much better information is available on online even though the excellent stuff has to be distinguished from a lot of utter rubbish. The problem with UK photographic magazines is that they are neither fish nor fowl; too elementary for those with any experience but too modern for those ill at ease and left behind by the digital world.

Here are the ABC figures for 2015 showing the year-on-year percentage changes:

Title	% Change
Digital SLR Photography	-24.7
Amateur Photographer	-11.9
Digital Photo	-10.2
Photo Plus	-6.2
Digital Camera Magazine	-1.6
Practical Photography	-1.4

Amateur Photographer Subscriptions: Buy NEW Don't RENEW

I took out a two-year subsciption deal (two years for the price of one) for the print version of Amateur Photographer. The renewal notice arrived a few weeks ago. The renewal was for 20% off. Thinking that was a very small discount and wondering if their marketing department was following the insurance companies and banks in penalising brand loyalty, I looked up the new subscription rates. Yes, they were penalising loyalty, was the answer, as the comparison below shows:

2 years Renewal £218.32

2 years New £163.99

1 year Renewal £116.44

1 year New £86.99

Needless to say, I bought a new suscription and threw the renewal notice into the bin. Is there no end to the rip-offs in Britain pulled off by marketing departments offering automatic and semi-automatic renewals to customers?

What an Idiot

A readers writing congratulating the editor on the new look of Amateur Photographer (I see no improvement in the content so far, but that is by the way) also objected to the magazine reviewing a lens (Zeiss Otus) consisting in excess of £3,000. Is there any hope when a magazine is expected to be run on the politics of envy? Of course we need good reviews of top-of-the-range equipment, even if only to allow a judgement to be made of whether a particular improvement or feature is worth paying for. A few more readers might be retained if this magazine aimed higher. There are many amateur photographers out there with expensive but appropriate gear for what they want to do who despair at the never-ending reviews of low-level cameras that litter the magazines. Do magazines in the USA, where the magazines seem much more aspirational, have this problem?

Photographic Magazines: Circulation Figures for 2013

The sales of photographic magazines continue to fall (see my post of 22 March 2013) along with virtually all magazines in the UK. Owners, editors and employess must be asking themselves, where will it all end?

Of those magazines audited by ABC, the year on year fall in circulation for photographic titles in the second half of 2013 was, starting with the worst: Digital SLR Photography -31.5%; Practical Photography -13.5%; Digital Camera Magazine -11.7%; Digital Photographer -11%; Amateur Photographer -9.9%; Digital Photo -5.6%. I do not know the circulation figures for other magazines that are not covered  by ABC, like Advanced Photographer.

The average change in sales of all UK magazines was -6.3%, so that photographic magazines, in general, performed worse than that.

Average sales for the monthly magazines ranged from 7,504 for British Journal of Photography (no figures available for year-on-year change) to 35,281 for Digital Photo. The average sale for the weekly, Amateur Photographer, was 15,505. 

Just as worrying for editors must be the result of the survey published in Amateur Photographer on 5 July. Yes, I know it is a self-selected group of readers responding but 52% said that they had been readers of AP for less than one year. No wonder the articles are at such a low level. But do the results of that survey also show that AP is not retaining its readership beyond the beginner stage, or that people stay in amateur photography, like most hobbies, for just a short time, or both? The ‘All New AP’ launched a couple of weeks ago is presumably an attempt to decrease or reverse the downward trend. Will it succeed? On its present showing I doubt it.

If magazine sales are falling, were are people getting their information? Even a basic photography book provides more information than a run of magazines but are people buying books? Or relying on the internet for information/misinformation?

Photographic Magazines: Circulation Figures

I had not realised what dire straits photographic magazines were in until I read a remark by William Cheung in Advanced Photographer. He said that from a circulation of 100,000 copies in the 1980s, sales of Amateur Photographer had fallen to just under 19,000. Intrigued, I investigated further and found the circulation figures for most, if not all, of the current UK magazines for 2012 together with the change over six months and year-on-year.

Magazine sales in general continue to fall. On average, the circulation of all photographic magazines fell by 7.9% year-on-year. Of those for which I could find figures, the worst performing was Digital Photo (-22.4% year-on-year). Then came Practical Photography (-20.2%), Digital Photographer (-17.6%), What Digital Camera (-15.5%), Photo Plus (-8.6%), Amateur Photographer (-8.1%), Digital Camera Magazine (-8%), Photography Monthly (-6.7%), Digital SLR Photography (-3.5%). Of these, of course, Amateur Photographer is the only weekly, with sales of 17,200 for each issue — even lower than William Cheung had indicated. Of the monthlies, Digital Camera Magazine was selling the most with 39,460.

Certainly, when I have looked at some of these magazines, the quality has seemed pretty dire. Digital Photographer, I thought, started fairly well but the quality has declined. Practical Photography, when I looked at it a couple of months ago, was really poor. Other readers must think the same given the marked decreases in circulation.

What happens next will be interesting. Will there be attempts by publishers to launch new titles in the hope of making a niche, as with Advanced Photographer? Or shall we see titles folding in what is an overcrowded market? Ot both? 

The demographics must worry the publishers. The average age of the reader of Amateur Photographer is 52 and 93% of its readers are male; for Practical Photography, it is aged 48 and 86% male. The male bias is to be expected but does the 7% female readership represent a spillover from the days Amateur Photographer was known by the female in this house as Amateur Pornographer?