Media Forum: Is the web killing men's mags?(marketing experts predict the downfall of men's magazines)(Market overview)

Is the internet a real threat to the viability of men's magazines, Alasdair Reid asks.

From the very beginning, as the men's magazine sector emerged from relatively obscurity to become a mass- market phenomenon, commentators have been predicting its demise.

Men's titles in the 80s were unapologetically niche and often, in the broadest possible sense, gay. There were scary levels of grooming and some pretty silly and expensive clothes - influenced as these titles were by the preening end of the New Romantic scene as it collided with the power-dressing City style of high Thatcherism.

The launch of Loaded in 1994 blew all of that away and the magazine (and its imitators) became highly successful in catering for a new generation of likely lads and lovable rogues. But critics said this would not last This was surely a passing cultural phase, as fleeting as psychedelia, say, or punk.

And then when the sector survived and grew, led now by FHM, people began to realise that something more basic was in play here. Sex, obviously. These rags were the successors of the rakish top-shelf magazines that had painted themselves into an indecent corner a generation earlier.

So, as the supermarkets and other distributors began to worry about the content of many of these titles - and bans loomed - it was not hard to predict that the sector was heading for a similarly seedy fall from grace. But no. The sector kicked on yet again with the evolution of the weeklies Nuts and Zoo alongside the staple diet of monthlies.

Or so we thought. Reports of this market's ultimate demise are in the air once again. And this time it is serious - as witnessed in the carnage of the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations figures. Many of the more prominent titles were down significantly year on year: FHM by 24.9 per cent, Loaded by 21.9 per cent, Maxim by 35.8 per cent.