Time Inc.’s Discover Wins Battle of Science Magazines but Its Future Is in Doubt
Mighty Time Inc.’s Discover magazine emerged this summer as the survivor of a costly six-year struggle with Science 86 and Science Digest, its rival popular science monthlies.
Starved for advertising, Science 86 disclosed in June that it would cease publication with its August issue and sell its name and subscriber list to Time Inc. for what sources said would total about $5 million. Two weeks ago, Hearst Publications removed life support from Science Digest and sold that magazine’s subscriber list to Time Inc.
Time Inc. had prevailed. But had it won?
Discover’s prospects remain a matter of some debate in the publishing industry, and if Time Inc. has outlasted the competition, it still faces a challenge in luring back advertisers who began fleeing the science category generally in late 1984.
“There clearly wasn’t enough advertising for three magazines,” said Paul Hoffman, who was executive editor of Science Digest. “The question now is whether there’s enough for one.”
Time Inc. officials assert that there is. Although advertising revenue has been flat so far in 1986, advertising sales for the September and October issues “are the best we’ve ever had, and our revenues for the year are going to finish up nicely,” predicts James B. Hayes, Discover’s publisher.
Difficult Job
The monthlies’ struggle painfully illustrates the difficulty of coming up with a winning new magazine--even for the publishing powerhouses and even on subjects of proven audience interest.
Discover’s survival is no small importance to Time Inc., which has not come up with a financially successful magazine during Henry A. Grunwald’s seven-year tenure as Time Inc. editor-in-chief.
Discover has already cost the publishing and communications conglomerate more than the $47 million that Time Inc. lost in 1983 on TV-Cable Week, its doomed cable listings weekly, industry sources say.
In 1980 and 1981, magazine executives were exuberant over the new science category.
Omni, the Penthouse monthly that combines science articles with science fiction, won quick success with readers and advertisers after its 1979 blastoff. Discover’s circulation took off quickly after its start in October, 1980, as did the circulations of Science Digest, redesigned from a digest-sized publication in 1980, and Science 80, which was put out by the nonprofit American Assn. for the Advancement of Science in Washington. (Science 80 changed its logo every year, becoming Science 81 in 1981, Science 82 in 1982 and so on.)
Thirst for Science News
In 1981, the three competing science-only publications had a combined circulation of 1.8 million, and Discover officials estimated that another 9 million households were potential subscribers. They saw an unslaked thirst for science news in the high ratings of television science shows and in the presence of science-related books on best-seller lists.
By the final issues of Science Digest and Science 86, the three magazines’ combined circulation had reached 2.25 million--a solid number, although far short of the predicted figure of 11 million. But the revamped Science Digest had never made money, insiders say, and Science 86, which covered its costs in the early 1980s, was losing $3 million a year when it closed, said a spokesman for the science association.
Omni’s mix of science fact and fiction, by contrast, continued to appeal to readers and advertisers. The magazine’s ad revenue has continued to grow but at a slower pace than in the magazine’s early days.
Erosion of the other three magazines’ ad base began with the sharp decline in personal computer advertising toward the end of 1984 and worsened last year as the magazine advertising demand softened overall. The list of defecting advertisers grew to include makers of autos, cigarettes, liquor and consumer electronics products, “and 1985 turned out to be just a disaster,” said Richard LePere, magazine consultant in Washington.
The science magazines were the first to lose ads when ad budgets were cut, he said, because advertisers reached fewer readers per ad dollar with the science monthlies than with many other magazines or television.
The stampede from the general-interest science magazines also affected Scientific American, the 142-year-old magazine that is written for scientists and readers with a greater technical background. Scientific American’s revenue fell to $13.2 million last year from $17.1 million in 1984, precipitating its sale in July to the German publisher Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck for $55 million.
Meanwhile, questions were also raised about whether the science format had a natural base of advertisers and whether the readership was, in fact, the largely male, well-educated, upper-income group that had been promised.
“The magazines never really had the ads they needed,” said Hoffman, the former Science Digest executive editor. “There’s not a natural category of advertisers drawn to the magazines, so the three magazines had to fight it out among advertisers who had other places to go.”
If Discover is going to survive, it will have to overcome resistance on Madison Avenue. David C. Lehmkuhl, a vice president at the N. W. Ayer advertising agency, is among those who take a dark view.
The magazines were started, he says, “by a group of people who saw a lot of technological development going on and thought people were really interested in these trends. In fact, I think most people don’t want to know about it; they’ll pay somebody to wire their VCRs.”
Earns $40,000 a Year
In his view, the readers of the science magazines are not the best advertising targets because they are a “pragmatic” group not inclined to splurge on such luxury items as expensive watches, diamonds and cars, for example.
Market research has shown that the average reader of the popular science magazines earns nearly $40,000 a year and is a male in his late 30s. But though those demographics are better than many magazines, they will not be enough to save Discover from the momentum that is now going against it, in Lehmkuhl’s view.
“It’s going to be a hard sell,” he says.
Others, including some former competitors, disagree. John Mack Carter, head of Hearst Publications’ magazine development group and a respected industry observer, says he believes that “there is no question that Discover will make it now that the category has shaken down.”
In the past six years, the magazines and their audiences continued to change and advertisers became confused, he says, particularly as rumors circulated that the magazines would be merged or shut down. “It got so there were more rumors around than advertising,” he said.
Carter believes that the magazine can succeed by concentrating editorially on subjects of proven interest and trying to cultivate the advertisers who have made Time Inc.’s Money magazine a success--the automotive, office supply and financial services companies, among others.
Discover Publisher Hayes says the strongest advertising category has been what he calls “information related”--book and record clubs, as well as such miscellaneous advertisers as the Franklin Mint.
Others important groups have been the automotive, consumer electronics and tobacco industries.
Hayes contends that the magazine has won new acceptance with an editorial format, begun last September, that concentrates a single lengthy cover story on a subject of wide interest.
The format change came after Time replaced Discover’s top editors with new blood from the company’s Sports Illustrated magazine.
The topics of the cover stories have included AIDS, the space shuttle and President Reagan’s “Star Wars” project. The magazine has also promoted itself heavily and will spend $1.2 million this year and the same amount in 1987 to attract advertisers, says Hayes, who predicts profitability within three years.
“The company’s obviously committed to seeing this thing through,” he says.
HOW THE SCIENCE MAGAZINES COMPARE Circulation (in thousands) Ad revenue (in millions of dollars) DISCOVER
1985 ’84 ’83 ’82 ’81 ’80 938 984 918 754 687 484 $6.4 10.6 11.9 9.6 5.2 1.2
SCIENCE DIGEST
1985 ’84 ’83 ’82 ’81 ’80 582 566 54 555 496 163 $4.1 4.9 4.8 3.2 2.9 0.38
SCIENCE 86
1985 ’84 ’83 ’82 ’81 ’80 730 719 716 725 639 387 $5.7 7.1 6.9 5.7 4.4 1.2
Source: Publishers information Bureau, Magazine Publisher’s Assn.
