The Differences Between UK and US Magazine Business Models

M.10 reports the contrast between UK and US magazine business models. The basic differences are that UK magazines have (1) less staff than US magazines and (2) operate under the control of a general manager who runs the magazine’s advertising, distribution, editorial and strategy, and who responsible for profit and loss, unlike the US model in which advertising, distribution, editorial, and strategy each report to difference honchos at the the corporate level.

“The European model is better because it makes it more of a team, with one agenda and one,” M.10 quotes Dennis Publishing President Stephen Colvin, whose launch of the of an American version of the British FHM magazine was the most successful launch of a magazine in the US during the past ten years.

We wonder how many US magazine Web sites operate under US print business model lines?

What We Do

Since 1996, the media business consulting firm of Digital Deliverance has provided publishers and broadcasters on four continents with strategic reviews and advice about how to profitably adapt to the epochal changes that computer-mediated technologies have wrought on the media environment and their industries.

Over the years, the firm’s clients have include The New York Times, News Corporation, The Irish Times of Dublin, Dagbladet of Oslo, The Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, Advance Publications, Critical Mention, MediaNews Group, New Century Network, the Media Development Investment Fund, the National Cancer Institutes, and scores of other media firms that need to adapt to computer-mediated technologies and the rise of Individuated Media.

The managing partner of Digital Deliverance is Vin Crosbie, Adjunct Professor of postgraduate New Media Management at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, in upstate New York. From 2007 through 2020, he wrote and was the sole instructor of the school’s New Media Business course, a course required for students in the New Media Management master’s degree curriculuum, an elective course for Ph.D. students, and a permission-only course for selected undergraduates and graduate students.

Digital Deliverance is incorporated as a limited liability company in the U.S. state of Connecticut, where it is based in the city of Norwich, Connecticut.