Research Task One: How has the UK Magazine Industry Evolved?

Within the UK, magazines have instilled themselves into the culture of the British public, primarily in 2007 and 2008, hitting peak sales upwards of 1.5 billion magazine copies, however, in recent years, the circulation has dropped to just under 500 million copies. There was a crash in sales around 2019 and 2020 for both print and physical media as a tag-team attack from Covid-19 and the increase in social media usage from newer generations left no need for people to go out and buy expensive monthly editions. The significant drop in the population's interest in physical magazines has led to the UK's spending on magazines dropping from just under £1.5 billion to just under £750 million, meaning magazine companies aren't receiving enough revenue to continue publishing editions like they want, leading to an infrequency in publication or a shutdown of the edition all together, for example, in 2000, there were over 700 unique titles for magazines but that has become 558 in 2010 and then 241 in 2020. As social media platforms allow for the population to receive free access to news, inspiration, and drama, - what magazines offer - the general population has no need for a paid version of what could easily be found online. News based magazines, however, are still upheld because of the older generation and the need for a reliable source of information where social media sites run wild with misinformation and rage-bait. The magazine industry, to combat this, have started moving online with subscriptions to their editions, much like how many of the national newspapers did and from 2017 to 2021, there has been an increase of subscriptions sold from rough 20 million to roughly 75 million, however, 57% of those subscriptions are to news based magazines. Overall, the magazine industry has evolved by moving to primarily online subscriptions to combat the increase in social media usage and the free access to information which lead to the downfall of over half the magazine titles in the UK.