What do men want? That is, men who are young, single, spendthrifty and care deeply about how Jessica Simpson appears in a push-up bra?
Freud never asked, and neither, apparently, did many of the men's magazines of the last century. Until six years ago, titles like GQ, Esquire, Details and Playboy ensured that monied, urban and college-educated types dominated men's subscription lists. But then along came British import Maxim, bringing with it D-cup starlets and such articles as “If These Sheets Could Talk.” Today, thanks to Maxim and its ilk — including Stuff, FHM and Gear — the men's market now includes the “laddies”: twenty-something single guys making $50,000 or more per year, seeking less the polished Playmate and more the “Girlfriend of the Day.”
These “laddies,” says Dan Capell, editor of Capell's Circulation Report, “are really a whole new group of readers.” And, he points out, they've been captured with a whole new circulation strategy. Unlike virtually every other category of magazine, most of these laddie titles took off with relatively little direct mail, relying instead on newsstand sales, blow-in cards and the Internet. Last year, in fact, Maxim dropped only a million direct mail pieces, and still gained more than 700,000 subscribers between January and June, thanks largely to inserts and the Web.
Granted, observers say this non-DM strategy can't last forever. Now that the laddie titles have been around for a while, competitors like Razor and Gene Simmons Tongue (don't ask) are trying to crash the young-guy party. With a rash of T & A on the racks (so to speak), the relative old-timers now have to work harder to get subscribers. In fact, even Maxim has begun to plateau on newsstands, after several years of triple-digit rate-base growth. It now plans to more than triple its direct mail drop and even “explore third-party partnerships” for subscriptions, says Jim Borth, circulation director of Dennis Publishing, home of Maxim and Stuff.
Still, it's still tough to feel bad for the laddie category. Their numbers alone are huge. Category leader Maxim is now at 2.5 million circulation after six years in business. Maxim's 3-year-old “sister” publication, Stuff, is at 1.2 million circ, and FHM, a 3-year-old British import, has just topped 1 million. Gear magazine, the 4-year-old project of Spin founder Bob Guccione Jr., adds about half a million readers of its own.
From the start, most of these titles managed to avoid the expensive bane of new magazines: direct mail prospecting. Partly, that was out of necessity; until recently, there were virtually no lists to prospect. Before the advent of the laddie category, would-be publishers could cull young-guy names largely from either special-interest titles, like Car Craft or Snowboarder, or vertical titles, like Sports Illustrated or GQ. (Even today, Capell contends, there aren't many men's lists on the market. “The only new lists,” he says, “are from FHM and Maxim.”)
Partly, too, the laddie titles simply haven't needed those lists to grow. Most appeal to a young, computer-active demographic (FHM and Maxim share an average reader age of 27 and income of $70,000; Stuff's average reader is 25, earning $50,000-plus). As a result, these startups could take advantage of two resources other men's titles haven't had: newsstand and the Internet. And in terms of both profits and readers, those have been fortunate resources indeed.
Newsstand has been especially kind to the laddies. GQ, Details and Esquire, for instance, are primarily subscriber titles, garnering less than 20% of their monthly circulation from the racks. Maxim, however, sells 800,000 to 900,000 copies per month on newsstands — more than the total circulation for GQ. (As Maxim founder Felix Dennis once told Folio:, “Any magazine that consistently sells over 400,000 copies on the newsstand is a very, very rare bastard.”) Likewise, both FHM and Stuff sell about 40% to 45% of their total circulation straight off the stands. That's despite the fact that none of these are checkout titles, and that newsstands are generally female environments. In fact, 60% of all single-copy sales are made at supermarkets, Capell points out.
“We had no idea Maxim would take off at the rate it did,” says Borth. “We just started blowing through the roof after the fifth or sixth issue.” Observers attribute that to Maxim's never-before-seen combination of eye candy (without nudity) and titillating cover lines. Apparently, it's one thing to try and catch a man's eye with a shot of Ralph Fiennes in Versace, or Kobe Bryant in midair; it's another to have Leah Remini in a bikini and a cover that promises sex secrets from around the globe. “These guys were breaking new ground,” says Lou Ann Sabatier, principal of Sabatier Consulting Group.
The newsstand has also been profitable ground. Not only do single copies sell at full price (compared with half price or less for subscriber copies), insert cards continue to provide a cheap subscriber acquisition method. In fact, even after six years in business, insert cards remain the No. 1 subscription source for Maxim and Stuff, Borth says. Compared with Web and direct mail subscribers, insert subscribers also renew best and have a 75% pay-up rate, second only to Web subscriptions.
“We still have more than 25,000 insert cards coming in every month,” Borth says of Maxim. “It's very, very healthy, and costs next to nothing.”
The Web provides the laddies with another low-cost circ source — and one that other titles are bound to envy. Although magazines like Details and GQ claim to have seen a “marked increase in Internet subscriptions” (according to Condé Nast spokeswoman Maurie Perl), they still don't share the Internet appeal of Maxim, Stuff and FHM. Given their younger, Web-savvy demographic, titles like Maxim “do a better job of promoting themselves on the Internet,” says Sabatier. Features like “Girlfriend of the Day” and video clips of MTV's “Jackass” give viewers reason to come back, get interested, and, often, subscribe. “We get 100,000 to 150,000 subscriptions per year from our Web site,” says Borth, noting that these respondents have an 80% pay-up rate.
Put together newsstand and Internet, and “these are big sources that other magazines don't have available to them,” says Capell. Only a handful of other titles — Men's Health, computer titles, Teen People and Cosmo Girl — have really made the Internet work for them, he points out. In part, that's due to their young demographics, but it's also due to “the time and energy spent developing the Web site,” Capell says. “You have to test like crazy which offers work. That's something Men's Health has done: If an offer doesn't work, it's off tomorrow.”
So where will DM fit in the laddie picture? Stick around. Two signs, in fact, point to DM as the next big wave for subscriber growth among the laddies. One, newsstands are no longer quite the wide-open frontier for this particular category. Two, direct mail — at least for these guys — appears to be working like gangbusters.
On the newsstands, at least, it's clear the laddie titles have perhaps been a little too lucky for a little too long. Until recently, “they've been able to splice and slice the market enough without playing me-too,” says Sabatier. But, she points out, with more titles trying to crash the category each year, “I think you'll see fallout coming real soon.”
To stay ahead in the game, Maxim is dropping 3.5 million DM pieces this year, in sharp contrast to previous years. In 2002, for instance, “we were looking at overdelivery of our rate base,” Borth says. “We had the good fortune to not have to mail as much.” But as Maxim's newsstand numbers hold steady, Borth says direct mail will help ensure the magazine maintains its 2.5 million total circ.
For its part, FHM is a big DM user, dropping 3.5 million pieces this year as its circ pushes past 1 million. Its more conservative approach is to grow newsstand and subscriptions simultaneously, rather than relying on newsstands to punch up the subs.
“We have 44% single-copy sales through the first half of 2002, the highest in the category,” says consumer marketing director Susan Allyn. “I have every intention of maintaining that 45% to 55% newsstand/subscriber ratio that we want.” To do so, she plans to mix subscription sources of inserts, Web, direct mail prospecting and gift subscriptions. Allyn also just dropped a 50,000-piece test that offers FHM subscriptions for Esquire renewals, and vice versa. All told, “this is a very classic launch,” she says.
So far, the laddies have no complaints about their DM results. Maxim and Stuff, for instance, have a 58% pay-up rate for direct mail, and a “cost per order that's extraordinarily low,” Borth says. Meanwhile, FHM has a “phenomenal response rate of 7% from prospecting to various men's subscriber and catalog lists, Allyn notes. “It was unheard of,” she says. “And pay-up has been over 50%, so we're netting what most people would like to gross.” Meanwhile, cost per order “is very affordable,” with only single-digit losses for a first-year subscription.
Clearly, the laddies still have it lucky, even in the mail. “I don't think they've had to chase marginal readers in other niches,” Sabatier points out. Still, it's hard for Borth not to be wistful for the days of newsstand blowouts. After all, nothing's more efficient as a subscription source than a blow-in card with a credit card number.
“Direct mail is a tough one,” Borth says. “You can do what you can with list selection, but you're still casting a wide net with people who may not have heard of the title, or were reluctant to buy on the newsstand. But it's still a low cost per order, so we can live with that.”
The good news, too, is that the 18-to-34 market still has a big appetite for what the laddies have brought, whether it's on the newsstand, the Web or the mail. “We've done very well for ourselves as a business,” Borth says. “But it's always good to be 10% to 20% paranoid in circulation. You never know when you're going to hit the wall on something. I'm sure we have the same sorts of agita as other circulation departments, but perhaps we don't take as many Tums.”
| TITLE | CIRCULATION |
|---|---|
| The laddie books: | |
| Maxim | 2.5 million |
| Stuff | 1.1 million |
| FHM | 1 million |
| The laddies' daddies: | |
| Playboy | 3.2 million |
| GQ | 775,084 |
| Esquire | 720,894 |
| Penthouse | 601,365 |
