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Old December 25th, 2006 #1
Alex Linder
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Default the 'Maxim' genre

Ads fade as lad mags get outdone by the Internet

By David Carr

NEW YORK: One million used to be something of a magic number in magazine publishing. If you captured a million readers, advertisers took you seriously.

Now? Not so much. This month, the British publisher Emap unceremoniously pulled the plug on FHM, a so- called lad magazine with a circulation 1.25 million, and left the country. In the last year, its advertising became as skimpy as the wardrobes of some of its cover models, dropping 19.7 percent in the first 11 months of the year.

A million-plus readers or not, the trends were clear. What had been a white-hot niche in publishing has gone cold. Even Maxim, the circulation leader in the men's category with a rate base of 2.5 million, is down 5 percent in advertising pages this year from the year before, and the lucrative newsstand sales have slipped by more than 200,000 in the past three years.

Could it be that the lad magazine genre is keeling over on its way to middle age?

Once derided — then occasionally imitated — by mainstream men's magazines like Esquire and GQ, the lad magazines landed with enough impact to alter the culture to the point where they no longer stuck out. The mix of not- quite-naked women, bawdy humor and stunt journalism once represented a British insurgency against political correctness, but that war has been all but won.

"Borat," after all, is a lad with a bad accent, relentlessly pursuing Pamela Anderson, the reigning goddess of the B-list universe that the lad magazines inhabit. Adam Sandler's universal remote in "Click"? Right out of the pages of Maxim, including a mute button for your girlfriend. And you cannot watch a beer commercial without seeing knockoffs from the men's titles: Miller Lite Beer's "Man Laws" are right out of the lad handbook.

But making lad magazines was tougher than it looked. Every editorial meeting would start with a blank slate, or at best, a few hardy perennials: Nazis? Midgets? Shark attacks? Could we have a Nazi saving a midget being attacked by a shark?

It fell to the cover models — most of them minor television stars — to sell magazines by wearing so little clothing that it seemed it would fall off if one stared long enough. A few years ago, I asked Bob Guccione Jr., who was then publishing Gear, a lad magazine, why the models in his publication were always tugging at their clothing.

"We've got a problem with sand on our photo shoots," he deadpanned.

Those sands shifted, as they have for a lot of magazines. Computer magazines came and went, mostly, and dot-com business magazines that weighed several pounds soon became brochures. Even the teen niche, which seemed robust a few years ago, dealt with a contraction that claimed Teen People, YM and Elle Girl.

Magazine publishers tend to see a destination with exciting demographics and then arrive en masse, a losing proposition in the long run.

Publications that create new ways of thinking about old issues — O, the Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Everyday with Rachael Ray, and even Dennis Publishing's The Week — can strike a chord and prosper.

Dennis Publishing continues on and off to shop Maxim around, along with the company's other magazines: Stuff, Blender and The Week. According to a source who was involved in trying to buy the magazine — he did not want to go on the record because he said it would hurt his relationship with the sellers — the company may have found a strategic buyer in a deal that could close in January.

Stephen Colvin, the chief executive of Dennis Publishing U.S., would not respond to reports of a sale, saying he "doesn't comment on rumors" and adding that it was silly to assume from FHM's departure that the category, or Maxim, was losing heat.

"Our first quarter is up double digits, and we finished the year very strong," he said last week. "We are the leader in the men's category and continue to add subscribers. Maxim entered and changed what had been deemed to be a mature category, and we continue to grow stronger all the time."

He also said the company's early digital and mobile initiatives were paying off.

In part, the lad magazines got lapped by technology. YouTube looks like a lad contents page with video. TMZ.com, a celebrity gossip Web site, has gone on high alert, covering Britney Spears in real time. And Heavy.com, an entertainment Web site, has America's Suck Countdown, with a joke-a-second cadence that would be hard for anyone to match, let alone a magazine.

"It is tough to come up with something fresh in the category," said Greg Gutfeld, a former editor of Stuff in the United States and Maxim in Britain. "The only innovation is price and frequency, and the only price that is working is free and the only frequency that is working is daily."

In Britain, Dennis Publishing has taken to heart the message that humor wants to be free and fast, coming up with a digital product for e-mail called Monkey.

It looks like a magazine on the desktop, complete with a gee-whiz, page-turning technology, but it is really a portal with lots of clickable videos and interactive features. You can not only read about the latest Clap Your Hands CD, you can click through and download some of it.

Where does that leave the world of paper magazines? Finding a really good idea that captures consumer interest is a trick.

Sustaining that interest for issue after issue with long lead times is brutal.

As Keith Blanchard, another former editor of Maxim, said, "It is hard to find the edge when the edge keeps moving."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/25/business/lad.php
 
Old January 9th, 2007 #2
Hugh Lincoln
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Join Date: Dec 2006
Posts: 53
Default

These magazines were great Jew tools for promoting false masculinity. Have a 'six-pack' stomach, own many techy gadgets - this is what you should aspire to. But for God's sake don't be "racist." That would be way uncool.
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