Another day, another teen magazine bites the dust. Last week it was the fall of NatMags' CosmoGirl!, while in August BBC Magazines will publish It's Hot! for the last time. These follow the closures in recent times of Sneak, Smash Hits, J17 and ELLEgirl.
The titles that remain - including Sugar, Bliss, Mizz and Top Of The Pops -have a fraction of their former circulation, with NatMags, IPC and Emap exiting the market altogether.
The current crop of teenagers, it seems, are largely failing to acquire a magazine reading habit that one senior publisher says sounds a warning bell for women's magazines, pointing out: "These are the people who in three to five years' time should be the core readers of Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire."
Already, the malaise has crept into the young women's sector, with titles such as NatMags' Company suffering a long-term fall in circulation, while IPC's 19 and Hachette Filipacchi's B have closed.
It's partly about the proliferation of media channels and the fact that teens are choosing to spend their leisure time online, on sites such as MyKindaPlace, Faceparty, Bebo and MySpace. It is also about teens "getting older younger" and buying magazines aimed at older audiences, such as Glamour or Heat.
Emerging trend
This is part of the motivation for IPC's recent launch of fashion weekly Look, which some describe as a younger version of Grazia. A similar trend has emerged on television, where shows such as Big Brother and The X Factor have blurred the lines between the teenage and young women's markets.
Yet, Jessica Burley, managing director of NatMags, rejects the suggestion that teenage girls are failing to acquire the magazine buying habit.
"Teenage girls are becoming adults earlier and are more comfortable reading Cosmo and celebrity weeklies with a pocket money price of £1 to £1.10," she says.
Burley says data from the National Readership Survey shows the audience of weekly titles has skewed younger in the past few years, but the readership profile of young women's titles such as Company has stayed the same.
There is still life in the teen sector, but a smaller number of players. Hachette Filipacchi, which owns the market-leading Sugar, and BBC Magazines, with Top of the Pops, are still in the game, while Italian publisher Panini has in the last year bought Mizz from IPC and Bliss from Emap.
Top of the Pops is no longer attached to a TV show and its associate publisher, Duncan Gray, laments the lack of a teen pop phenomenon such as Take That or the Spice Girls that did so much to boost the sector a decade ago.
He adds that the recent restrictions on advertising high fat, sugar and salt foods have hurt the teen sector. "Procter & Gamble is one of our biggest advertisers for the young end of the lifestyle and FMCG products, and also music companies and cinema, but our biggest advertisers were brands such as Snickers, Twix and Coca-Cola," Gray notes.
For many advertisers targeting teens, magazines are no longer on the radar.
Emma Sheehan, associate director at Carat, uses online channels almost exclusively. "It's so difficult to get to teenagers with magazines, especially since boys and girls are so different at that age," she says.
Nick Ashley, joint head of communication planning for MindShare, who looks after the Nike account, says teens want the immediacy of the online environment.
"Even the weeklies get out of date so quickly and they want to comment on it, interact with it, and with their mates, so it's as much through the web as printed products," Ashley says.
Audience creation
But going online does not provide an easy answer for teen publishers - the dynamic on the web means that you have to create an audience first and then advertisers will follow, rather than create a product and hope the audience will come. NatMags originally conceived its new digital magazine Jellyfish for teenagers, but is now repositioning it for 18 to 25-year-olds.
Judith Secombe, publisher of Sugar, points out that traditional teen websites delivered content, which was sufficient until the entry of social networking sites that allow teens to edit and produce content themselves.
She adds: "The next stage in Sugar's digital development is not a magazine site. It is an application that allows the user to have a completely different online experience within the trusted relationship they have with the Sugar brand."