Makes Sense: Luxury Magazines Woo More Advertisers than Readers

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Print magazines seem to have captured wealthier folk's attention, therefore they've also captured luxury brand advertiser's attention. Bloomberg's Pursuits, known for its readership's $450,000+ average annual income, upped its issues from two to four per year, and everyone knows by now that Vogue killed it ad pages-wise in their September issue.

These are just two of the advertising success stories in luxury-oriented print mags mentioned in a recent Luxury Society article. The problem, however, is that it's difficult to put a finger on to whom these ads are circulating, since readership is declining by double digit percentages year-by-year across the board.

While those two incongruous trends (ads up, readership down) don't bode well for the future of print media, the situation might not be as ominous as it looks. Robin Steinberg, director of publishing investment and activation at MediaVest USA, explained that if that looks bad, then you're not looking at the whole picture. He told Luxury Society that "Newsstand is not the barometer of vitality anymore. It's an overall brand evaluation. Not the brand in silos but the goal of how a brand does on multiple platforms." Basically, multi-channel or print-digital hybrids seem to be the way of the future, and advertisers are still buying into it. And that's good news for Vogue.fr and all the other multi-platform superstars out there.

· Prosperous Times for Luxury Print Media, Or Are They? [Luxury Society]
· Surprise, Surprise: September Rankings Show Vogue FTW [Racked]
· Elle China Has So Many Ads, It Has To Publish Twice a Month Now [Racked]