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."