A Place For Guys

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Nov 1, 2002

Man walks by newsstand. Man sees magazine with semi-naked woman, who may also be semi-famous celebrity woman. Man stops. Man picks up magazine. Man thumbs through, sees stories on sex, beer, CD burners. Man buys magazine.

And so, another lad magazine deal is sealed. It's not a terribly complicated process, and the motivation behind such a deal lies not so deep within the occasionally reptilian brain of the American male. You don't need million-dollar research studies to tell you why these books - Stuff, FHM, Maxim - are the hottest things in publishing these days short of Rosie's temper. But a research study, in fact, does provide added illumination.

Recently, MRI did a special run on 320 consumer titles. Of these, it determined that 61 were specifically targeted to men, and 63 were targeted to women. (Magazines were counted only if 70 percent of their readership was comprised of either sex.)

That doesn't seem at all unbalanced. But here's where it gets interesting. MRI determined that for the men's magazines, the total unduplicated audience was 62.5 million readers, and for the women's magazines, 81.5 million readers. You don't need a calculator or a degree in math to know that's a big gap, and it is that gap, MRI reasoned, which the "lads" are filling in. The question posed by MRI is simply, Why are there so many more female readers than male? The answer: There have not been enough mass-circulation magazines out there specifically edited for men's interests. Near the top of the list of women's magazines you have the six sisters, all of which have whopping circulations. But the majority of titles on MRI's list of 61 men's magazines are specialty titles, including Car Craft, Handguns, Sport Truck, and Hot Rod. MRI execs say that magazines like Maxim have flourished because, aside from a handful of titles, there have been few male-oriented magazines attracting male readers in massive numbers. As Julian Baim, top research officer for MRI puts it, "There's a niche for publications that can tap into and define the new-generation male in the way Playboy did in the '50s."

Based on these MRI readership numbers - which have not been previously published - it's not an entirely unreasonable conclusion. But research doesn't always tell the whole story, and there are other questions that MRI doesn't (or didn't necessarily want to) answer. An obvious one: Are men less predisposed than women read a magazine?

Or this: U.S. Census data shows that there are more women than there are men, so one could then conclude that, naturally, there would be more female readers. Ah, the beauty of logic.

Yet here we present the one thing that numbers, no matter how well crunched, may overlook: Maybe, just maybe, these lad magazines have grown because there's a whole new generation of readers who were weaned on TV and feel more comfortable with a magazine that's more like, well, the boob tube than just another magazine.

Says Melissa Pordy, senior vice president of print for New York-based Zenith Media: "These titles are targeted at a very, very elusive audience, [and] I think these lad books hit home with the irreverent humor, the sex, the sort of how-to-be-a-guys' guy, in that best-buddy voice. It's such a hard-to-reach audience - they're out there surfing the Net. They're consuming media in a wider array." Ah, the beauty of common sense. If only someone could measure that.