Is celebrity really losing its appeal?

As well as year-on-year losses of 3.7% and 3.4% respectively at Heat and Closer, Now dropped 8.5% year on year, New! 3.7%, and Star 5.4%. It is the first sign of a slowdown in a market that has enjoyed years of unprecedented growth.

But does it mean the love affair with celebrities is finally over? No, say industry insiders and celebrity commentators. Eve Samuel-Camps, deputy press director of Universal McCann, is among those who blame the decline on confusion rather than celeb fatigue.

"There's just too much choice in the weekly market," she says. "They all have the same content, and readers are not loyal. The only loyalty appears to be to the titles aimed at an older audience - Hello! and Grazia - which are doing well."

Negative content

Scan newsagents' shelves and you realise what she means. A handful of names dominate covers - Kerry (Katona), Katie (Price aka Jordan), Jennifer (Aniston) and Kate (Moss), alongside the latest reality TV Z-listers. Covershouts are equally homogenised. If it is not a star's weight, it is her drinking habits or relationship turmoil.

PR guru Mark Borkowski, whose clients include Noel Edmonds, believes negative content has undermined magazines' access to stars and, as a result, their cache with readers.

"The talent does not want to be in them," he says bluntly. "Or the talent that wants to be in them - such as reality TV stars for instance - people don't want to read about."

A-listers only want positive coverage, and only brand leader Heat gets away with being less than kind, he adds: "Heat invented that market and the rest are just so similar. They are struggling to get big scoops and a lot of the material comes from agencies that repackage it and sell it elsewhere a couple of weeks later."

Jules Stenson, assistant editor at the News of The World, disagrees that the quality of talent in magazines is a turn-off.

"The bestselling edition of the News of the World this year was the interview with Jade Goody after Celebrity Big Brother. We sold three and half million that Sunday," he says. "It was the biggest selling paper in Britain this year and we did nothing to promote it."

Its second-biggest seller featured Kerry Katona. "Naff celebrities definitely sell," Stenson observes.

Sophie Wybrew-Bond, publishing director of Heat and Closer, says the number of celebrity wannabes emerging from reality TV has placed pressure on magazines.

"There are more reality stars than ever coming out of these shows," she admits. "It's up to us to pick the right ones, because they will always have currency."

Nik Vyas, group press director at ZenithOptimedia agrees and believes the ABCs reflect a correction, not a shakedown, in the market. "The level of growth was unsustainable. It's amazing it has lasted so long," he says.

"If you look at the performance of other sectors, they fluctuated a lot more, so celebrity magazines have done well."

Hello!'s success is not about access, he claims, pointing to Heat Radio's strong showing in the Rajar figures, adding: "There is a huge appetite for that kind of entertainment."

Website traffic

Certainly the strong growth in traffic to the weeklies' websites implies no diminution of interest.

Although competing against revamped web offers from the red-tops, Heatworld.com has 125,000 unique users, while the relaunched nowmagazine.co.uk has grown to 98,000 unique users, according to Nielsen NetRatings.

Emap's Wybrew-Bond is among those who believe the slowdown follows a sector-wide price hike. But the fact that price figured strongly in promotional strategies this year undermines this argument.

The strong performance of IPC's Look supports the argument that the weekly market is suffering from a lack of differentiation - it was almost single-handedly responsible for overall market growth of 7%, thanks to a debut ABC of 318,907.

Publishing director Julie Lavington claims: "Look has come into the marketplace with an entirely unique concept.

"Our celebrity content is far more about style and celebrating them looking fantastic. We would rather concentrate on A-List celebrities - Big Brother is not really core to what we are all about."