CTV colleague and fellow blogger David Akin posted a link to this article to CAJ-L. It's from Direct Marketing and it's about the U.S. magazine industry

An excerpt:

We have run out of readers in this country. You may have heard about the recent, mind-blowing study by the National Endowment for the Arts in which it found that book reading has decreased 10 percent since 1982. Fewer than 47 percent read any form of literature in the previous 12 months. A similar statistic exists in the magazine world, but it is usually tucked in among other, more palatable facts. It is called the “Annual Combined Paid Circulation Per Issue,” and it hasn’t moved since 1990.

Based on this statistic of magazines measured by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, U.S. magazines grew very nicely from 245 million copies in 1970 to 366 million in 1990. Then they stopped dead. The year 1991 saw 365 million. In 1992 it was 362 million. Year 2000 showed an up-blip to 379 million. But the last number we have is for 2003 — a miserable 353 million.

No matter how many new magazines launch, the number of them sold, as an aggregate, has not changed for nearly 14 years. We have run out of magazine readers, and publishers are just stealing them from each other. Keep that in mind when you rent your next list and when you settle in with a glossy, new magazine to read.

Whether as a marketer or as a reader, it’s about time that we get a few new, bright magazines on the newsstands.