A client who is reducing his shelf space in magazines, asked whether I could advise him about the magazine sales now. I data mined his figures for the last quarter.

My advice to him is that overall he has about an 4% drop on every magazine category except the home and garden category. The home and garden category in his shop is up by about 3%.

So I would suggest leaving the home and garden category the same or perhaps even increasing it somewhat and reducing all the other magazine area by 4%.

Home and garden category includes such magazines as

Title
Australian Handyman
Australian House & Garden
Australian Home Beautiful
Belle
Better Homes and Gardens
Burke’s Backyard
Country Home Ideas
Country Style
Earth Garden
Gardening Australia
Inside Out
Real Living
Vogue Living
Your Garden

Note some of these are not doing well

Here is a radio interview on the closure of country newspaper distributions with Carolyn Doherty from the Australian Newsagents' Federation and Brad Layton the owner of a country newsagency in New South Wales.

I thought it was very good. The points were clearly made. I was disappointed that no-one from Fairfax was there to respond.

One issue that I think should be mentioned is that it is all well and good to complain, but nothing was said about what could be done to try to fix the situation. For example, why was the local newsagent not armed with special offers from News Limited that is still delivering there in an attempt to save these seventy five (75) clients that he has possibly lost?

The Newspaper works is the industry body for the major newspaper companies in Australia.

They have just produced to recent reports on newspapers in Australia

State of Australian Newspapers

Newspaper fast facts

Both I think many will find quite surprising. These I think confirms what I have been saying for a long time that newspapers are still a good product. They bring plenty of people into the shop, the margins are reasonable, take up only a small space, etc. but newsagents need to change to accommodate the new market realities.

Read it and make your own mind up.

The Artwrap catalogue file is now available for download

For this and other supplier files please visit here

The BrownTrout catalogue file is now available for download

For this and other supplier files please visit here

Today Artwrap released a new catalog file. Please do not use it as the barcodes are wrong. We are endeavouring to get a corrected copy. Hopefully, it should not take long.

A new newsagent called me up today to compliment me on how quick it was to do magazine returns on our system.

He felt that the software was brilliant as was our quality of training and support. As a result, his magazine return's process was quick and accurate.

It was very nice.

The News Limited consultation came to see us today to talk about the home delivery data situation. What he was particularly interested in was Victoria and Queensland. It is part of their ongoing program to improve their distribution system.

We told them that we thought the existing systems in Victoria were okay, better than the systems say in NSW.

The issue came up of XChangeIT something that News Limited has been considering for many years. The problem here is that only half the newsagents have it. Even less, if you include people with News Limited accounts who are not newsagents. Furthermore, that they would need to change many newsagents existing procedures for them to get sales data as few invoice newspapers daily.

The problems we saw with the existing data system is that.

1) A reconciliation of a News Limited account is extremely difficult.
2) Orders get changed without warning so someone that works out exactly what they require can suddenly find that they have been cut back by 10% leaving them with a terrible problem of what to do.

We told them that we felt the best ones to discuss the situation with was the newsagency associations, and we were very pleased to hear that they had just spoken with VANA and were going to be talking soon to the ANF.

People who I have known for years at Fairfax have gone, they were replaced by new people, and these people have gone. It looks like this will continue. As anyone who works with Fairfax that there is a lot of staff turnover there.

According to reports, Fairfax plans more cost cuts as its first-half profit fell by 44%. So I expect another round of staff cuts there.

One interesting comment by the Fairfax chief executive Greg Hywood

The owner of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age newspapers was no longer a newspaper company, he said, and too much money was being wasted on printing costs which would be reduced.

Looking at the recent ABC circulation figures, I am not surprised as the SMH’s Monday to Friday, sale was down by nearly 12% year-on-year despite the increase in cheap giveaway copies.

Still, I doubt in the short term that many of my clients will be seriously affected as the existing staff cuts have already been extensive. Still less staff can only make the situation worse.

Still, I hope that Fairfax decides to work more with newsagents to try to supply newspapers more closely aligned with sales. Computerization can be a big help if it is used. This could reduce costs while keeping sales.

News Limited consultations are looking at their home delivery system for newspapers. This by them has been an ongoing process as far back as I can remember.

The last time we meet officially with them about this was two years ago when I got the message from them that they were going to leave essentially everything the same for the next ten years and think about what to do then. I would not be surprised if this plan is still in place. If so that is eight years left of the same.

Anyway tomorrow they are coming to discuss it with us again, and I am very keen to hear what they have to say.

The latest study from Roy Morgan on the readership numbers of newspapers and magazines in Australia tend to confirm the recent Audit Bureau of Circulation results, which I blogged here a few days ago.

Click here for details

It's hardly a set of figures that would encourage an advertiser to spend. I think it is about time that the publishers faced the reality that either the cover price needs to go up or the margins go up or the costs for the sellers be reduced or a combination of all.

Yahoo has an interview with a writer of greeting cards.

I think that as a seller of greeting cards you will find it interesting and give you some thoughts to consider on how to position the product for different customers.

It is available here.

Nine has a great deal of debt; one possible solution is for it is to sell ACP.

Probably, the logical company to buy it would be Pacific Magazines, which is the only other major player. However as most of you are aware this is considered unlikely as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission will probably not allow that.

However that leaves several other players who might buy it. Click here for more details.

For those that are involved in the current Newsink promotion which which early figures suggest went very well,

Customer buys $100.00 or more of inkjets on the one invoice, receives one FREE Golden Mars 4 GB USB DSUSB4

Dynamic Supplies require the paper work done by tomorrow, 14 Feb 2012.

To obtain the report for number of batteries sold during the promotion or at the end of the promotion period

Go into “Cash register” menu

Go into “Transaction Enquiry” > “Search Transactions”

Search by “Stock Desc/Barcode

In box below scan in the battery barcode and set “Amount Between” to $80 - $10000

Tick Box “Tick Transaction Details In Box” (shows all items sold in each transaction)

Go “Find”

Print out report & put with claim form or else print to *PDF and email claim

Another newsagent point of Sale supplier NewsPOS has given up on newsagency software. It is a bit scary what is happening now in the market place which has been so stable until recently.

Last year another well-known Point of Sale software supplier almost went under and could not sell. It still cannot be sold. I know to look at the figures I was not interested.

I do expect that there will be more dramatic changes in the marketplace in 2012.

Overall magazine circulation dropped 5.6% for the October to December quarter in 2011 compared to 2010.

Some publishers like ACP went down a lot 6.4% others like Express went up 1%.

What seems to be happening is the larger circulation figures dropped less than the smaller ones. I am sure this in part has to do with the reduction in shelf space that retailers are now allocating to magazines.

Overall newspapers circulation dropped 4% for the October to December quarter in 2011 compared to 2010.

What it does look like is that those newspapers that are number two in their category took most of the damage. We are still slowly moving to a one newspaper, a town model.

In NSW, the Sun-Herald took the biggest hit, although overall Victoria's figures are worse.

Sunday newspapers are down, compared to the rest partly I am sure as the number of outlets selling these are going down.

And Fairfax did worse than other suppliers.

Artwrap latest barcode listings is available now.

For this and other supplier files please go here for download. (Outdated file - decommissioned)

A few people asked what did our benchmarking of Telco's products show.

Here are some results.

It is a very seasonal product. Sales go up at the end of the year dramatically.

Overall integrated Telco's products has been growing among our users. The rate of growth in the past two years has been annually about 51%. The rate went up slightly this year to 55%. There is little sign of any slow, down so we expect another 50% growth rate in 2012.

2011 saw a large growth of about 15% overall in turnover. Part of this was due to the slight increase in price of the product of about 4.6%. Still, that leaves a healthy growth of 11% a year.

However, I suspect that rate of growth of outlets is much larger than the growth rate of the sales. This is compounded by a slow drop in margins. Two years ago an average profit on a sale was $1.62, today it is about $1.32. This has resulted in an overall drop in profits for this department of 18.9% a year per shop. Part of the problem here is that I think many of our clients are not reviewing their rate cards. As such they are selling products with low margins. If you have not done so, I do suggest that you take a good look at the latest product and margin listings available here

The turnover per site seems to vary greatly and I do not see any pattern, country vs city, metro vs suburb, etc.

If you want to know more about what is involved, please let me know.

http://mumbrella.com.au/magazines-fall-furthest-in-2011-ad-spend-study-…

The decline in newspaper and magazine advertising sales continued in 2011. Although the final figures are not officially released newspapers are about 7.3% down on 2010 and magazines about 8.2%. That is just over a hundred million dollars.

With fewer advertisers, the only solution for print is to increase cover price, reduce more marginal product and reduce the number of circulation editions. For example, one magazine I read frequently has gone from being a monthly with twelve editions a year, to eleven editions with one being a bumper.

Except for an increase in cover price, I doubt the number of issues will have much bearing on my clients most who cannot handle the amount of stuff they are getting now anyway,

In 2011, the average sale price for magazines for my clients remained the same.