Launched on Tuesday night at the Sway club in Covent Garden, it goes on sale on January 22 promising to offer readers a mix of sport, news, television and women. It is edited by Phil Hilton, former launch editor of the defunct IPC title Later.
Chief among the criticisms is that the magazine looks strikingly like Emap's women's celebrity weekly Heat.
Tim Caira, deputy press director at PHD, said: "It looks a lot like Heat. Curiously, there doesn't seem to be any bylines on editorial -- as if no one's owning up to it. I think readers will want to know things like sport credentials as these pieces are classic tabloid territory and written by experienced writers in the likes of The Sun."
Managing partner of MindShare Tony Evans goes further. "Perhaps expecting another revolution in men's publishing was setting targets too high. The first issue does look to me like a lot like a love child of Heat and FHM. It does offer a lovely combination of useless information and pictures that FHM readers have thrived on, but if it wants to be considered as a topical title it has to be more up to date."
Andrew Samms, media planner and buyer at Initiative, agrees on the Heat comparison but is more positive. "There's nothing wrong with that," he says. "Content is varied and not too text-heavy, which is good for just dipping into. The magazine seems to have attracted some good advertisers -- Hugo Boss, Dixons -- but I still have reservations. A lot of the content looks like filler. I'm not sure whether I'd want to read about superguns and certainly not every week."
Buyers also expressed uncertainty on whether men will read a weekly title that has no market precedent with the current trend being that men jump from newspapers filled with sport straight to the monthly magazine market.
Tom Wilkinson, media manager at Carat, said: "The monthly lads' mags have proved that this is what men want to read about but do they not already get their weekly fix from the tabloids, weekend newspaper sections and the internet?"
Caira agrees, underscoring the problem of how difficult it is to get men to read anything at all. "It's difficult enough to get men to read full stop, so I'm not sure whether they will want to read a magazine on a weekly basis."
If the market is there, buyers are enthusiastic about the possible advertising opportunities and MindShare's Evans sees it as a possible alternative way to reach men who are notoriously hard to reach through other channels.
"As long as this can be done in large numbers and provide a more cost-effective way to communicate, advertisers will be interested," Evans said.
Buyers also speculated on whether there was room for two men's weekly magazines as Emap's Zoo Weekly prepares to follow Nuts out of the stable later this month.
Evans is damning about Nuts, and what he sees as its weaknesses could make its position precarious and possibly prone to being beaten by rival Zoo Weekly.
"It could be that Nuts will take a few issues before it settles down but unless it improves, all Zoo has to do is to have a slightly better product -- which shouldn't be too difficult -- and it will easily make up for any potential loss of readers they have suffered by being second into the market," Evans said.
Once the market is opened up there is also a threat of other competitors. Caira claimed that he would not be surprised if Richard Desmond, whose Northern & Shell owns the Daily Star, OK!, Hot Stars and New, launched a low-cost version to compete with both titles.
However, some buyers believe that if Nuts succeeds it will benefit the industry as a whole.
According to Carat's Wilkinson: "From an advertising point of view, I hope the emerging men's weekly market succeeds. It provides a fresh new outlet for male-targeted advertising on a more frequent basis."
In its defence, IPC Ignite!'s managing director Tim Brooks claims that Nuts is a men's not a lads' mag and that it will define an entirely new category of magazine. Maintaining that the market is big enough to accommodate both Zoo and Nuts, Brooks says that the weekly sector could be as big as the monthly sector by the end of 2005.
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