Digital DNA

To continue the analysis of what the UK’s biggest-selling magazines are doing online, I have analysed the market sectors rather than the magazines themselves.

The analysis points to a clear conclusion – the bigger the market sector (in terms of magazine sales), the less the sector has developed its online offering. I guess this is obvious in a way, as the bigger the revenues are, the more the publishers are protecting their positions.

This is a false economy in my opinion and shows that traditional magazine publishers have a lot of work to do to maximise their online potential. They should be using their financial strength to invest in the future of these sectors and brands – as part of that future will be on a digital format whether they like it or not.

The Analysis
1. Women’s Interest: Women’s Weeklies
19 magazines in this category (17 of which are in the UK’s top 50 magazines) totalling over 9.6m magazine copysales every week. Only 8 of the 19 (42%) have a website, but only 4 out of those 8 have a website that registers in the top 250,000 sites in the world.

The digital star of the women’s weekly category is Hello, with a global Alexa ranking of 7,720.

My wife is a Heat reader, yet every day, she goes on to her Bloglines account and reads celeb gossip and TV info from other sources (Digital Spy, E! to name just two). Heat clearly doesn’t give people like her enough, yet I know that if this stuff was available on the hour from a Heat website, she would be there. And Heat would make more money out of her attention.