2005 Annual Report - Magazine Ownership

The top 10 magazine companies in 2003 were the same as in 2002, though there was some shuffling among the ranks. Hearst, which publishes Cosmopolitan, Esquire and O, and Advance, the owners of Condé Nast, which publishes Allure, GQ, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, switched spots in the pecking order, with Advance climbing to second. But in the end every company in the magazine game is playing on a completely different field from the number one company. Time/Warner is the largest media company in the country by far, owner of 32% of the magazine revenue among the top 10 magazine companies. In fact, Time/Warner alone made much more in magazine revenue in 2003 than the next two companies, Advance and Hearst, combined. ¹

Magazine Revenue of Top-Ten Companies, 2003

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Advertising Age, Chart: 100 Leading Companies

The peculiarity of magazine industry ownership noted last year still holds true, and will for the foreseeable future absent some large merger. The biggest of the big media companies are largely forgoing magazines as potential outlets. Of the top 10 media companies overall, only Time Warner has invested seriously in the business, and that is largely an accident of history. The company is rooted in magazines; Time Inc. was started in 1923 as a magazine company, and then expanded into cable with HBO. That said, after mergers with Warner and later AOL, today only 15% of Time Warner's media revenue comes from magazines. The multimedia giant Disney is a player in the magazine game, though in revenues it places only at number 20 among magazine companies. And while the media heavyweights Viacom and News Corp. do publish magazines, they don't even come close to making the top 25 magazine companies by revenue.²

As noted last year, the biggest media companies generally steer clear of magazines and the biggest magazine companies generally steer clear of the news genre, with of course the exception of the biggest, Time Warner. Newsweek, the number two news magazine by circulation and ad pages, is owned by the 15th largest magazine company, The Washington Post Company. U.S. News and World Report, the number three news magazine, is owned by the 25th largest magazine company, Zuckerman Media Properties. Neither of those two companies is a magazine company per se. The Washington Post Company has its hands in many media, but is most heavily invested in newspapers, though it made an interesting play for online readers with its purchase of Slate at the end of 2004. And Zuckerman owns one newspaper and one magazine - the company was reportedly in hot pursuit of New York Magazine, which Primedia sold in 2003, but it didn't get it.³