Unsurprisingly, there have been winners and losers, with the older end of the market performing better than the younger, celebrity-obsessed mags.
Vanessa Clifford, head of press at MindShare, concurs. "The monthlies have had fairly good ABCs this time around - it's about substance over bling," she says.
By far the biggest loser of circulation in the women's fashion magazine market was Bauer's More, which plummeted 37.6% year on year.
However, Sam Fitz-Gibbon, More's managing director, pointed out that this is the first ABC for the title since it switched from a fortnightly to a weekly. "We are selling 60% more copies than we did as a fortnightly," she says, arguing that More's sales of 162,544 copies a week represented more than 700,000 copies a month.
NatMags' Company also performed poorly, down 9.2% year on year. Natalie Rutherford, head of press at Vizeum, says: "This is partially because Company's younger audience is spending more
time on the internet than reading magazines."
IPC's Marie Claire, celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, was down 4.8% year on year.
However, Jackie Newcombe, managing director of IPC Southbank, claims that, offset against a cut in the number of UK editions sold overseas, the number of domestic subscriptions and news-stand sales are stable. "We're about 0.5% down period on period," she says.
One winner in the women's glossies was Hachette Filipacchi's Psychologies, up 15.4% year on year and 7.1% period on period. MindShare's Clifford says: "This demonstrates that if you get the editorial right, then readers will come to it."
NatMags' Cosmopolitan also fared well, with circulation up 4.4% year on year. Publishing director Justine Southall attributes the rise to 18 months' hard work. "It's a tough market and we're in a fantastic position, but we can't be complacent," she says.
However, Vizeum's Rutherford points out that much of Cosmopolitan's rise was down to a year-on-year subscriptions hike of 40%, driven partly by incentive offers."News-stand sales have stayed quite static," she adds.
Cosmopolitan's stablemate Prima did not perform as well, sliding 5.8% year on year. Matt Salmon, group publishing director of NatMags' women's lifestyle, says: "We are in a crowded sector. We're competing with the weeklies, monthlies - everyone.
"But, from September, we'll be giving consumers 30% more pages for the same cover price. We recognise that, while we have a loyal core audience, with subscriptions of 108,000, how we appeal to occasional consumers is just as important."
Elsewhere in the market, weekly fashion title Grazia grew 3.2% year on year. Managing director David Davies says: "It's our seventh consecutive increase, but we will not continue to grow on a double-digit basis."
Alan Brydon, head of press at MPG, is positive about the glossies sector as a whole. "Given what is happening in other media, the women's lifestyle sector is pretty stable," he says.
