Newsagents should heck through their sell-through rates for the Reader’s Digest magazine. If the data I have seen is experienced by other newsagents, Reader’s Digest is delivering a sell through of around 25% to the newsagency channel. This makes it loss making for us.
A magazine needs a sell through 60% to be break even in many newsagencies.
Why we continue to be supplied Reader’s Digest knowing that 70% or more of the scale out by Network Services will have to be counted packed up and returned is beyond me. Actually, it is not beyond me. The magazine distribution model relies on the services for which distributors are paid (distribution and return processing)to be used.
Magazine distributors will say that we need to consider the overall picture, suggesting that the profits of the top selling titles support the lesser performing titles. The same argument would be rejected by supermarkets so why apply it to newsagents.
For years now I have called for KPIs for magazines and financial compensation where a title does not meet the KPIs.
Reader’s Digest needs to be profitable for newsagents on its own.
While I am sure there are some newsagencies achieving a profitable sell through with Reader’s Digest, I suspect that the majority are not. Somewhere between the publisher and the distributor there appears to be a lack of will to resolve this. In the meantime, newsagents act as the financier to both.
I stopped the supply a year ago. always got ten per issue, sold 1 in six months.
I got 60 copies sold around 20 copies , used to get 100 copies and over .they are mad!!!
hardly sell a copy these days .
I get 2 copies, I sell 1 most months, sometimes both. Its small size permits me to face it in front of other slow sellers. My goal with my mags was purely the sell thruogh numbers, I may have as many titles as I did before but nowhere near as many copies. My goal it to return one of every title.
We get 6 and I sell 2 a month to the same 2 customers. have tried it on the counter, on the papers, with the business mags, with the womens mags everywhere and always only sell the 2. We see alot of customers who have just picked up there mail from the post boxes near our shop and I quite often see a readers digest in there mail. Is this a magazine that people are more likely to subscribe to?
We sell an average of 4 copies. Normally recieve p copies which is a bit of a waste of time really considering 5 is probaly my highest sale.
That should read 9 copies.