Monday 24th January 2011 - Media Guardian
Sugar magazine, the UK’s best-selling teenage girls’ title, is to be closed in a further example of the structural challenges facing magazine publishers as young readers shun print in favour of free digital content.
Hachette Filipacchi, Sugar’s owner, said it had decided to close the magazine in response to the “fundamental shift” in teen publishing, as teenagers “spend their media time on mobile and web platforms and increasingly expect to receive content for free.” It is an issue that the music industry – along with most media owners – has been struggling with for some time.
"It's an overwhelming consumer trend," says Mike Soutar, founder and chief executive of Shortlist Media, the publisher of the free men's weekly of the same name and its "freemium" sister title Stylist, launched in 2009. "You can't have something as culturally significant as digital media and not expect it to change people's habits.
Sugar's tumbling circulation, to an average of 113,320 a month from a high of 422,179 in the first half of 2000, reflected a teenage market which has shrunk 75% in a decade.
Sugar will live on via its website, Sugarscape.com, which has around 430,000 unique users a month, while Elle has looked to offer its readers a "360 degree experience" with complementary content on apps and online. On the same day that it announced the teen magazine's closure, Hachette Filipacchi issued figures showing Elleuk.com had gained its 200,000th Twitter follower. But that will have been no consolation to staff on Sugar.
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