successful brand, Men's Health. But in a time of dismal economic headlines and a culture newly attuned to thrift, a magazine that celebrated the carefree consumerism of the bubble years with cover lines like "7 Secret Wealth Builders" and "Upgrade Your Image Instantly" seemed like a relic from a bygone era.

The news of Best Life's demise came on the same day that American Express Publishing announced it was folding Travel+Leisure Golf, an 11-year-old spinoff of its venerable travel title. Taken together, the latest magazine failures signaled to many publishing observers that magazines—long thought to be partly insulated from the digital forces battering the newspaper industry—are locked in their own death spiral. For evidence, they point out that since last March, more than two dozen major magazines have folded.

But a closer look at the types of magazines that have closed reveals a more nuanced and, in many respects, hopeful portrait of the magazine business. According to a list compiled by Advertising Age, titles that have shut down in the past year come from the shelter, technology, travel, luxury, and teen categories. The reason for each category's challenges are obvious, from a meltdown in the housing sector to teenagers' wholesale abandonment of print for Facebook and Twitter.

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Yet the general conclusion that many extrapolate from these recent shutdowns is wrong. It's not that magazines are dying; it's that magazines that were created solely for advertising or market-share purposes are. New magazine titles often fail from a combination of bad timing, bad thinking, and a bad choice of brands to extend. Put simply, there are too many mediocre magazines (as anyone who gazes at the newsstand at Barnes and Nobles would conclude).

In one way, publishers are suffering from the same tendencies as traders binging on mortgage-backed securities: When the advertising market in a particular genre begins to rain really hard, publishers respond by trying to create more buckets, instead of working to find the next bucket where passion resides. The reality is that once a market is mature enough to support a national magazine, chances are it has already peaked.

During the last boom, publishers conceived titles as advertising plays and targeted the areas of a rapidly expanding credit bubble. It's not surprising, then, that shelter titles sprouted up as the housing market inflated or that Condé Nast launched Portfolio, its business title, just as the finance bubble peaked in spring 2007. (Disclosure: I was a staff writer at Portfolio.) In many ways, Portfolio signified the strategy embraced by publishers during the run-up. Back in August 2005, when hedge-fund managers were the new rock stars, Condé Nast wanted to take a big piece of the advertising pie long dominated by Fortune, Forbes, and Business Week. Officially, Condé Nast's position was that Portfolio would reinvent the business category with more ambitious writing, photography, and design. But, fundamentally, Portfolio was a corporate move designed to develop a new market of business-to-business advertising for Si Newhouse's magazine empire, which had always counted on fashion and luxury categories for a majority of its ad revenue.

Publishers don't just look to new titles to grow their business. They also seek to leverage existing titles into new categories. Now, with advertising spending on the skids, spinoffs are another major casualty of the magazine pullback. Of the 27 magazines on Ad Age's list, roughly one-quarter of the abandoned titles were brand extensions. In the past year, Condé Nast killed Men's Vogue as a stand-alone title, and plans for Vogue Living have been put on ice. Time Inc. pulled the plug on SI Latino, while Hearst yanked O at Home and Cosmo Girl. Last Friday, Jann Wenner's Wenner Media announced it was delaying the launch of a quarterly fashion magazine, Us Style.

Largely, these magazines never caught on with readers. And it's not surprising. Magazines are emotional products. They are objects of aspiration, passion, and desire. No one needs to read magazines, but millions of readers still subscribe to their favorite titles because they harbor deep connections to the glossy pages. As one veteran editor once explained to me, the best magazines make you feel like tearing open the plastic wrap the second that they arrive in your mailbox and curling up on the couch with them, ignoring whatever plans you had for the evening.

Which is why the current downturn can be good for publishers. Magazines still offer an unsurpassed ability to marry literary ambitions with deep reporting, photography, and visual design. In this new media age, people talk about the importance of transforming readers into "communities." Magazines have never had a community problem. Great magazines have built enduring relationships with their readers that Facebook and Tumblr still aspire to. But in a race to grow their businesses, publishers put advertising first and editorial excellence second.

There are exceptions to this rule, of course. In 1974, Time Inc. spun off People magazine as a standalone title from Time, launching the modern era of celebrity journalism and creating a title that generates $1.5 billion in annual advertising revenue. More recently, in 2005 Condé Nast launched Domino, its hip shelter title. When the company announced earlier this year that it was closing the title amidst the worst housing slump since the 1930s, my girlfriend and her friends mourned the decision along with thousands of its devoted readers. Although Domino couldn't succeed financially in this climate, its knowing-but-friendly approach to home design gave readers the sense that the magazine was created expressly for them and not to service ad buyers.

Bron: www.thebigmoney.com