ABC's - Publishers take titles online in bid for growth

by Adam Woods, Media Week 19-Feb-08

Not content with slugging it out over copy sales every February and August, some leading publishers, principally in the men's lifestyle market, have opened up a new front in the ABC war in an effort to demonstrate their cross-platform growth.

Bauer's FHM.com declared it had 1,785,033 unique visitors in January
2008, while Dennis highlighted the fact that its Monkey e-mail magazine
went to 271,667 people each week and 942,184 people a month.

Nuts and Loaded were audited at 945,790 and 308,442 unique users per

month respectively, according to their November 2007 ABCe figures, which
were published as part of IPC's ABC Group Product Report on 4 February.
And Zoo, now owned by Bauer Consumer Media, recorded an ABCe audit of
807,059 unique users for January 2008 at www.zootoday.com.

This ABCe face-off in the men's market is something of an artificial
construct, as publishers elect to undergo an ABCe audit and can decide
when the figure is released.

Monkey publisher Richard Downey freely admits to moving the online
magazine's ABCe audit to bring it in line with FHM.com and so trigger a
head-to-head. The ABCe trend is also encompassing titles as diverse as
Cosmopolitan, Hello! and New Scientist. The magazine drive follows the
heady uptake that has swept the newspaper industry.

Chris Boyd, ABC chief executive, says: "Magazines have been dabbling in
online and digital, although it is a lot more difficult to bring
magazines to the web than it is newspapers. Several groups now want to
start using (ABCe) to show that they are reaching much broader audiences
than their print ABCs suggest."

For IPC Ignite managing director Eric Fuller, this is very much the
intention, combined with a push for transparency of online measurement:
"The (multi-platform) reach of our brands is something we can quantify
in very substantial numbers - something media agencies can trade on in a
completely transparent way."