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| Press Room |
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| For The Week, success in 1s and 2s |
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Still tiny but adding readers at a steady pace
By Jeff Bercovici
Media Life
August 16, 2002
A year and a half is seldom enough time to judge whether a new magazine is a success or not, but it’s usually enough to get a sense for which way it’s headed.
But with The Week, Dennis Publishing’s ultra-concise newsmagazine, that’s not easy to do. With its unique editorial format and unusual business model, The Week throws out many of the traditional measures of success and failure.
Take, for instance, its circulation growth. In 2003, The Week will raise its rate base from its initial 100,000 to 125,000. That leaves it only about 3.9 million copies behind its best-known competitor, Time magazine.
Here’s another way to look at it: In the second half of last year, Stuff, another one of Dennis’ titles, increased its circulation by about 300,000, more than 10 times The Week’s gain.
Yet Dennis officials are fairly boasting about The Week’s growth, and there’s more to it than just spin.
That’s because those 25,000 new customers will be putting up serious money for their subscriptions, says Carolyn Kremins, The Week’s group publisher.
“We are an expensive subscription vehicle in terms of what we ask,” says Kremins. The Week’s basic one-year subscription rate is $75, and its cheapest subscriptions cost $50.
Time’s average annualized subscription price is $47.37, and it’s a good deal more expensive than U.S. News & World Report, at $34.84, and Newsweek, at $30.50.
What’s more, in an industry where renewal rates are usually a source of shame, The Week’s subscribers have been renewing at a rate of more than 70 percent, according to the publication. Given the high cost of acquiring new customers, that’s a huge advantage for a new title.
Kremins suggests that the best yardstick for The Week is not Time or Newsweek but The Economist, a magazine whose global outlook and droll but concise tone give it a similar feel.
After 22 years in the U.S., the rate base for The Economist’s North American edition is 330,000, making it only about three times the size of The Week. Of course, in terms of subscription price, The Economist blows away its rivals, charging an average of $103.88 for a year’s worth of issues.
Kremins says a reasonable target circulation for The Week five years down the road might be something in the neighborhood of 500,000. The U.K. edition has a circulation of 80,000, and the rule of thumb for comparing British and American magazines, given the differing size of the markets, is to take the British title’s circulation and multiply by five.
The Week’s original plan called for the number of ad pages in each issue to be capped at six to keep clutter to an absolute minimum. As of next month, the ad cap will be raised to nine pages, with new positions being created on the inside front and inside back covers. In order to keep the editorial well the same, the magazine will increase from 40 pages to 44 pages per issue.
Kremins decided on the change after moving over from Maxim to The Week three months ago. Further changes are possible, but she says the proportion of advertising to editorial pages will never rise above 30 to 70.
Despite The Week’s small size and newness, Dennis has worked hard to create an aura of success and influence around The Week. The cover of each issue quotes a celebrity, media figure or top executive who has praised the magazine. This week’s, for instance, has Fox News’s Monica Crowley saying, “The Week is cleverly written and brilliantly organized.”
Sometimes these blurbs are solicited by the The Week’s editors or publicists, but many of them are spontaneous, says Kremins. The magazine, which culls the week’s essential news from hundreds of newspaper, magazine and web site reports, has received largely positive reviews from the beginning.
More than anything else, what people like about The Week is that they actually get around to reading it consistently, unlike most other publications, says Kremins.
“Magazines like The New Yorker or The Economist are great magazines, but what happens is they start piling up, and you start to feel really guilty,” she says.
“It’s our dirty little secret.”
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