Emap's Bliss continued to outsell Hachette's Sugar to take its spot as best-performing title, but was still down 23% in the January-June period and 22.7% for the year.
Bliss registered a circulation of 213,466, compared with Sugar's 200,187.
Although she welcomed the news that Bliss had outsold Sugar, the managing director of Emap Elan, Dawn Bebe, said it was time for reflection. "It's been a fairly volatile market as teens are buying more magazines, but from the adult sector," she said. "There is a lot of competition for their time."
Julie Harris, head of Hachette's women's group, said: "These figures are quite one dimensional as a lot of our focus and effort has been about extending our brand beyond the news-stands.
"We don't talk to advertisers about just the Sugar magazine anymore, we talk about the Sugar brand."
She cited its website as one area of growth and said the company was also looking at extending the brand through mobile phones.
An isolated success story was DC Thomson's Shout, which Bernadette Casey, development manager for children's titles at the publisher, put down to it being a shorter, faster read. It was up 23.2% on last year and 11.5% in the period.
"Some of the other magazines are quite meaty and I think we have a formula that really works," she said.
Casey claimed that, while TV and the internet may have shortened the attention span of teens, the success of Shout showed that magazines could adapt to this.
With the migration of much of the target audience to the net, the poorly-performing Mizz is relaunching and going online next month. Meanwhile, Emap is closing Sneak.
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