Australia’s magazine industry is facing similar mass circulation drops as newspapers, with our highest selling women’s mags crashing to its worst ever figures.

However Roy Morgan research has found titles with growing year-on-year circulation tend to be niche market magazines – such as 4WD mag 4×4 Australia with a 26.8 per cent jump in readership, and food and wine title Selector Magazine which rose by 48.5 per cent, but their overall numbers are a fraction of the mass market women’s magazines.

Glossy mags such as Cosmopolitan, Womens Weekly and Marie Claire circulation figures all sunk by significant amounts this year, Cosmo feeling the biggest burn with readership plunging by 44 per cent in only one year.

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Figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation’s latest report also found The Australian Women’s Weekly’s print run fell below 400,000 issues per month – numbers the magazine has never seen in its publishing history.

According to the report, Women’s Weekly and Pacific Magazines-owned Better Homes and Gardens are the only non-weekly mastheads that still maintain a circulation of more than 100,000.

Yearly readership for popular magazine Marie Claire also dropped by 12 per cent, and Bauer Media-owned NW magazine also had a gloomy year with a 28 per cent slump in readers.

Pacific Magazines foresaw the magazine prophecy and pulled its tabloid Famous magazine off the shelves in April in favour of a digital-only model.

When the gossip mag was axed its circulation sat at around 45,000 per issue. Since its online transition to FamousLive, the website managed to garner only 13,871 unique browsers per month.

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