American man

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, June, 2000

It's Raining Men. We're barely into the 1990s and already some have labeled it the decade of the American man. Not surprisingly, a new crop of men's magazines, seeking to dethrone GQ and Esquire, is eager to cash in on the hype.

Sure, it's raining--dollars. But just for the few men's titles that remain (read: beer-and-babes books a la Maxim and its sister publication, Stuff). They may have flooded the market in the early 1990s, but the glut was soon followed by the inevitable shakeout. How many men's titles have gone under? Let us count the ways: P.O.V., Icon, Bikini, among others. Meanwhile, the mature titles continue to thrive amid the frat boy pubs: GQ's first-quarter 2000 ad pages are up more than 11 percent over 1999, and Esquire, while it slumped in the late nineties, had a 15 percent hike. It hasn't lost its literary voice, either, picking up a National Magazine Award recently for Review and Criticism. (See "Conde Nast, Time Inc. Crowd the Winner's Circle," this page.)