Business press: how are we doing?

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, May, 1990 by John Emery

John Emery is president of the Association of Business Publishers.

Popular wisdom to the contrary, the business and professional magazine industry is healthy and growing

Although recent articles in the trade press suggest that advertising pages in specialized business and professional publications are on a downward spiral with no end in sight, it is my belief that both advertising pages and dollars invested in the pages of the business press are healthier than generally assumed and poised for an upswing in the nineties. This belief is based on data I have examined since june 1989, when I took over the presidency of the Association of Business Publishers (ABP) and established as one of my first priorities to determine just where the business press was and where it was heading.

The highly entrepreneurial and diverse nature of business and professional publishing and the high number of publications in the market make it difficult to define precisely that market's dimensions. Although there has been growth in the number of publications in the larger companies through both acquisition and start-up, there are more publishing companies overall and more magazines every year. However, no single organization tracks the advertising page performance of all the publications in the market; in fact, many publications are not tracked at all. For example, there are 766 publications with primary listings in the Medical/ Surgical sections of SRDS (BPRD), of which only 387 are tracked (by Perq Research Corporation, a firm specializing in following the medical group).

Aside from medical publications, there are another 3,433 publications with primary listings in SRDS. LNA/ Rome, a leading space-tracking organization, tracks only 640, leaving 2,793 untracked. ABP, with its larger, more profitable publishers, restricts its membership to audited, for-profit publications, At the end of 1989 ABP had 588 member publications out of a potential universe of 1,310 publications--and so on.

Recent analyses tracking the ad revenue and advertising page history of a constant list of publications indicate declining page volumes for those magazines, but they do not measure the growth and vitality of the marketplace as a whole. Given the increase in titles in the specialized business press over the past several years, it is probable that pages and dollars in the total market are increasing, even though some individual market segments may show declining page volume.

Enumerated in the charts in this article are certain knowns about the marketplace. The ABP tracks some of this data, and Standard Rate & Data Service, LNA/Rome Reports and Perq Research Corporation have supplied additional information. Jim Boddorf of Veronis & Suhler and Arthur Rosenfield, president of Business Development Group, were also helpful in evaluating the data.

The publication universe

As of December 31, 1989, SRDS listed 4,199 publications with primary listings in the business edition. Of these, 2,784 were published by for-profit companies, but only 1,310 were audited by an accredited auditing bureau. In addition, there are 792 association publications and 470 annuals. In 1989, there were 588 ABP members. To get an idea of the change in the numbers since 1985, see the chart on this page.

The 4,199 publications listed in SRDS's business edition as of December 31, 1989, represent an increase of 460 publications, or 12 percent, over a four-year period. There was a net addition to the primary listings in SRDS in each of those four years.

ABP's best estimate, based on information from diverse sources, of the advertising billings in the business press for 1989 is $4.23 billion.