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Imagine yourself as a consumer magazine in an increasingly digital age. You have been loved by many, but times are changing and no one can say how many eyes will still be on print in the decades to come.

So, you look hard at yourself and consider how you might change in order to follow modern audiences onto multi-media platforms.

First, you spawn a website and realign your editorial and commercial teams accordingly. Whereas 100,000 people used to read you when you were just a magazine, fairly soon you have a further online audience 10 times that number.

Things start to move fast. You offer podcasts; you offer video; you do some deals and you launch some other properties: a TV channel, perhaps, or a radio station. Or you might branch out to a niche website, a mobile portal, a social networking destination, a whole calendar of sponsored events, even a set of branded luggage.

And it all works out very well: the reach of the brand is far greater than it has ever been, your advertisers have all kinds of multi-platform options, and you have as many as five different revenue streams. You should be happy.

And yet, every February and August, the ABCs come out and the only thing anybody can say is: "Your circulation has gone down. Are magazines dying?"

Pity this fictional magazine, and sympathise with its real-life equivalents, many of which have undergone transformations in recent years and have received less credit for their efforts than they perhaps deserved.

The multi-platform model continues to pick up momentum, if not always respect. Publishers such as Bauer and IPC suggest that the right magazine can yield an entire family of interdependent media properties, and the spin-offs have become so varied and numerous that it is hard to know just where to point first.

You might start with radio, where Kerrang!, Q, Mojo and Heat have all made the jump, and Closer and NME are soon to follow. Or TV, where National Geographic recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary; Nuts, NME and Q have set out their stall more recently; and Smash Hits lives on - a magazine brand with a radio station and a TV channel, but no magazine.

Then there are the online developments: Closer's slimming site, Closer Diets; Nuts' new social networking forum, My Nuts; Bauer's new social navigation site Ditto, due to launch this month; the online TV offerings from Condé Nast's GQ and Vogue; the mobile TV from FHM and Monkey; and the content-rich websites from virtually everybody.

Not every magazine will give birth to a multi-platform media empire, but the many that do not are no longer just magazines. Today's basic publishing paradigm favours a dual-platform approach, incorporating print and online. Brands with the right kind of proposition, meanwhile, can do much more. But which are those brands?

Brand awareness
Jo Smalley, publishing director of Nuts and Loaded, says: "This is a question that comes up a lot: can every brand do this? And I say no, not every brand can. But if you have a magazine that has extremely high levels of brand awareness, a clear understanding of what each medium should do for the brand, the right partners, and a core editorial proposition that works across all platforms, then you have a chance."

If nothing else, online and broadcast extensions certainly give publishers a chance to rack up the numbers. In December, Smalley says, Nuts.co.uk registered one million unique users, while Nuts TV claimed a reach of 1.4 million adults in March.

Successful examples of cross-platform expansion run from the niche to the mainstream. In each case, the principles are the same: does each new platform do justice to the brand, and is the extension a good product in its own right?

For celebrated multi-platform brands such as Bauer's Kerrang!, radio, online and events provide far greater reach than the magazines they are based on, drawing a mainstream audience into the orbit of a relatively specialist brand.

For 20 years, from its launch in 1981, Kerrang! was a heavy metal magazine selling around 45,000 copies a week to a pool of around 150,000 people, according to Stuart Williams, deputy managing director of Bauer Metro.

"Within a year and a half of the launch of Kerrang! TV [in spring 2001], magazine sales had doubled and readership had gone from 150,000 to around 500,000," he says.

Today, around four million people are exposed to the Kerrang! brand in some form every week, whether via FM radio in the West Midlands, on digital radio elsewhere in the UK, on TV, on the web, or through the pages of the parent magazine.

Sophie Wybrew-Bond, deputy managing director of Closer and former publisher of Heat, describes the print magazine as "the engine of the brand". She is referring to Heat, but the sentiment is universal. "Any new stream of content is probably going to originate in the magazine," she says. "The magazines are still the engine, and anything that increases loyalty to the magazine is a sound business principle."

The collective aim of Heat and Closer's non-print extensions is not to pull in huge new audiences, but to increase the number of times that existing or occasional readers come into contact with the magazine brands. Wybrew-Bond explains: "There are very few people who have never dipped into Heat or Closer but are suddenly going to be a fan of Heat Radio or the Heatworld website."     

It is easy to stereotype consumer behaviour and assume that magazines for older readers need not expand beyond their print product.

A common mistake, according to Linda Swidenbank, publisher of IPC's Woman & Home, is to assume that web communities are purely for magazines with a hip, young readership.

"There are more people over 35 online than under 35, because there are obviously more of them about," she says. "Our site has around 70,000 unique users, and the magazine has a print run of around 338,000. Our readers are very active online, and they love shopping and keeping in touch with their friends and family."

Promoting interaction
As with many magazines, Woman & Home now integrates the web into its editorial processes, using the site to drive real-time engagement, carry out research on behalf of advertisers, and promote interaction between readers.

But if forty-something women may be more au courant than publishers sometimes assume, their kids are another breed again. Paul Cheal, publishing director of NME and Uncut, says: "Kids are incredibly promiscuous when it comes to media consumption, and you do need to be on every single platform."

NME's most recent brand extension was a US version of the NME Awards staged in Los Angeles, adding to the magazine, the website, the UK awards ceremony, the festival partnerships, the branded gigs and tours, the TV, the podcasts and, from this summer, the radio. NME claims a reach of 1.2 million each week through NME.com, TV and print, rising greatly during the festival season.

But despite such prodigious commercial development, the NME has suffered at ABC time, which is one reason why IPC elected to issue a first ABC group product report for the title last August - along with Nuts and Loaded and, in February, What's on TV - listing print circulation alongside web traffic and event attendance.

"The problem lies with the casual observers who say: ‘Oh, look at the circulation, [the magazine] is about to close'," says Cheal. "But they don't know anything about publishing magazines, because the magazine is by far the most profitable part of what we do with NME, even if NME.com is the fastest-growing."

Even for those publishers not pursuing a multi-platform strategy, the landscape has changed enormously over the past decade.

Dennis Publishing chief executive James Tye says he does not picture himself launching full-scale TV platforms, but credits online with one-third of group ad revenues, and points to Auto Express as a strong example of a title whose print circulation masks a larger commercial picture.

"The magazine's circulation is around 82,000, but in April we had more than a million unique users on the Auto Express website," says Tye. "If we had just stuck with the magazine, our audience would have been 300,000 or 400,000, based on four or five people reading each issue. This way, we have an audience of nearly 1.5 million."

Tye is convinced that online success can fuel a print brand. He says. "People come to the website for a review or for a news story and it does expose them to the brand."

Brand exploitation
Condé Nast has kept its brands anchored entirely in print and web, and GQ publishing director Jamie Bill says there are "several good reasons" for leaving it at that.

"We are constantly bombarded by people wanting to exploit the power of the brand," he says. "We filter all those requests, firstly by the requirement that we have complete control over each venture, and secondly on the basis that anything we did would have to reflect and build on the existing brand values."

GQ's production values, says Bill, would make the migration to a broadcast platform prohibitively expensive. To prove it, he reveals that Condé Nast has repeatedly turned down offers to create a TV property from the Men Of The Year awards, although he adds that there are strategic retail partnerships in prospect for the magazine's 10th-anniversary issue in December.

Such brand extensions represent a new platform in their own right, and the men's lifestyle sector is a fertile market for branded goods. For example, Monocle's online shop sells a range of travel luggage, which has become a  compelling business in its own right, with 2,000 bags sold around the world. A Monocle fragrance, launched in February with Comme des Garçons, raises the bar still further.

Given its sideline in merchandise, the next platform for the brand is more likely to be retail than TV or radio. Tyler Brûlé, editor-in-chief of Monocle and Monocle.com, says: "People have come to us and said, ‘do you want to take a couple of square metres [in-store]?' That is something we are looking at: it follows the luxury goods model of having a retail space where you display your entire collection."

As a new magazine in a multimedia age, Monocle has had the opportunity to offer what it believes to be the best mix of platforms right from the start. The monthly edition, with its bookish quality, is designed to be collectable, and back issues can be bought from the website. Most of the print content is subscription-only, and Brûlé believes those who go online will typically also buy the magazine.

In a media sector that often can't help itself slipping into siloed thinking, the blurring of lines between platforms and the swelling definition of magazines into brands is not always the easiest concept to swallow.

Likewise, fully multi-platform strategies remain an object of some scepticism among those publishers who don't yet pursue them. But just as the default print model has become print and web in a matter of years, you wouldn't want to bet against the power of technology to transform the magazine sector once again.