Newsagents have easy access to magazine sell through data data through the Magazine Sell Through Rates Report with which they can make a case on oversupply by a magazine distributor.

Using industry standard calculations, a Magazine Sell Through Rates Report identifies the titles that are failing to meet minimum performance levels.

Magazines delivering a sell through of lower than 50% are, in my view, under performing. These titles are titles that I would label as over supplied.

The sell through is the percentage of the stock supplied that was sold.

The image shows one page from a magazine sell through rate report from a newsagency. I’ve obscured their identity.

My management tip for newsagents today is to run the Magazine Sell Through Rates Report.  Look at what it shows for the last year. If you have titles consistently below 50% sell through this is evidence you ought to send to the ACCC as proof of poor treatment by your supplier.

Magazine distributors say to the ACCC that newsagents have control. This is not the case, not with certainty and not for the long term.

This report offers further evidence to magazine publishers as to why newsagents sometimes early return a title without apparent justification.

In an interview in yesterday’s Australian Financial Review, Bauer CEO Matt Stanton forecast that there would be more magazine closures as well as some launches as the business responded to title performance. Newsagents with a copy of yesterday’s newspaper should read the article – page 38.

The bigger story in the AFR article is the growth in digital subscriptions with Stanton claiming 20 to 30 percent growth quarter on quarter. He says they have 116,000 tablet subscriptions across their titles.

Stanton I think mistakenly says that tablet subscriptions are pure profit once you have the back end setup costs covered. This presumes that you have a print product to cover all editorial costs.  My reading on the topic indicates we are not seeing people embracing both platforms in large numbers – it is digital or print. So it would be wrong to say that a digital subscription is pure protect. It must wear part of the content creation cost.

The AFR article reports Stanton saying its feasible Bauer could achieve 500,000 digital subscriptions across titles such as AWW and Gourmet Traveller. The road to such an achievement is by way of current print sales.  I expect strategists in all print publishing businesses see the current print products as the bridge to the platform they expect one day to overtake print in sales and value to the business.  This is why publishers will continue to tell newsagents that print is important to them for some time yet.

An area where the company could save is in oversupply. There are several Bauer titles I’m receiving where sell-through is lower than 50%. These titles are loss making for us. The continued excess supply does not make sense.