The first reason is increased market share. This means that the company will have more dominance over a certain topic and be able to influence a larger audience from a range of hubs. An example of a parent company whom illustrate this point are Condé Nast, an American mass media boasting of over 165 million consumers. The coorporation owns 20 magazines: Allure, Architectural Digest, Ars Technica, Bon Appétit, Brides, Condé Nast Traveler, Epicurious, Glamour, Golf Digest, GQ, The New Yorker, Pitchfork, Self, Teen Vogue, Vanity Fair, Vogue, W, Wired, Reddit and Backchannel. Of its 13 UK magazines, five are dedicate solely to fashion and they all appeal to the same kind of style. These magazines are Vogue, Tatler, Brides, CQ Style, and Vanity Fair.
The next reason why one company may desire to own a lot of magazines is because it allows them to provide a variety of genres or topics to attract a wider audience. If we take the Bauer Media Group as an example, they create three different UK-based music magazines: Mojo, Q, and Kerrang(!).
All three magazines are based around non-popular music, out of the mainstream to attract a hipster audience. The founders of Q said that their magazine is for the "generation of older music buyers", who presumebly are not as fond of contempary pop that youths and young adults jam to, today. Mojo magazine is said to "cater for the burgeoning interest in classic rock music", which proves that this magazine also does not conform to mainstream society and the musical trends of millennials. Kerrang! brags of being "the world's biggest-selling weekly rock magazine!" showing that once again, it doesn't provide pop.
What all this means is that the Bauer Media Group manage to cater for most music enthusiasts who don't listen to conventionally pop music and this benefits them because Kerrang is able to advertise Mojo to it's alternative audience, Mojo is able to advertise Q, and Q is able to advertise Kerrang, ultimately meaning that Bauer dominates the non-pop music genre of magazines making it difficult for any other, smaller magazine to steal it's audience.
This ties in with my final point, which is smaller magazine companies will find it harder to compete with bigger magazines which benefit large organisations. An example of two magazines which provide similar content but vary a lot in popularity is Smithsonian and the National Geographic.
Smithsonian's total circulation is 1,840,077, whereas National Geographic's circulation is 6.1 million. The National Geographic is so popular and well-known for creating amazing travel and culture content that consumers do not feel the need to research into smaller magazine brands which are alike to the National Geographic, because they have the reassurance of the National Geographic's popularity.
No comments:
Post a Comment