The first to suffer were the stalwarts. Teen magazine folded in 2002. That year Seventeen’s ad revenues dropped 14 percent. In the past three years YM’s circulation has fallen from 2.2 million to 1.5 million. Teen People, which had been attracting an impressive 1.6 million readers with a mix of celebrity coverage and features about regular kids (teenage firefighters and Hispanic homecoming queens), began to fade on the newsstand. “The field became too crowded,” says Brad Adgate, chief media researcher for Horizon Media.
Maybe, but several magazines that took aim at the niche markets are doing fine. Last year CosmoGirl pulled in 1.2 million teens–up a full 18 percent from 2002–by crafting their pages for girls between the ages of 13 and 15. One-year-old Teen Vogue favors fashion shoots over “Can You Kiss?” quizzes and estimates its newsstand sales at about 325,000–only 135,000 less than newsstand sales for the mother ship, Vogue. “We’re never going to be a magazine for all teenagers,” says Teen Vogue publisher Gina Sanders. But in the teen category these days, “bigger isn’t always better.”
Scrambling to create niches for themselves, Seventeen and YM have gone back to the drawing board. Both have decided to court older teens, 17 and up. “You can’t talk to teens as a group anymore,” says Joan Sherida LaBarge, publisher at YM. Just like the old YM, the new YM will cover celebrities, beauty and fashion. But the bubble-gum pink typeface is being replaced by something more sedate, and giggling stories about boys will be replaced by more soulful articles about relationships. Executives at Seventeen, which has already begun rolling out its more mature look, say recent newsstand sales are up.
The repositioning is a risky one, though. Today’s media-savvy kids are more sophisticated, and “many teen magazines are really being read by tweens,” says Carolyn Bivens, president of Initiatives, a media buying group. The older teens that Seventeen and YM are chasing may have already moved on. The shop-ping magazine Lucky and the triumvirate of look-alike celebrity weeklies In Touch, Us Weekly and the Star have already grafted candy-colored graphics and prom-ready fashion spreads onto their own winning formulas–and they’re thriving. While they don’t brag about their teen readership, they may have hit on just what teenage girls want: a magazine that appeals to their twenty-something sisters.
