Launching a new magazine? What even is a magazine?

The ones who used to have the greatest success are now the ones who fail the hardest

If you look back at the old magazine market, there is a really fascinating pattern that emerges. The pattern is that the magazines that used to have the largest circulation are now also the magazines with the steepest declines.

What I'm talking about are magazines like these:

What all these magazines have in common is that they were not really defined around any specific focus, but were instead defined to fill a specific pre-internet type of moment.

That moment was the afternoon boredom.

Let me explain.

I want you to think back to before the internet, and look at how people consumed the media. To massively simplify it, we generally had three media periods throughout each day. The morning newspapers, the evening TV viewing, and the period between these two (after work) where we had nothing to do.

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