Travel v food: An analysis of the UK magazine market

Yesterday I shared my own experience in running this site and my food blog, The Gooseberry Fool, and asked how big the travel blogging niche actually is. The difference in traffic between the two sites has surprised me but I wasn’t sure how indicative it was, so I decided to look at it a little more scientifically.

I have ventured into the offline world to analyse the circulation data of travel magazines and cookery magazines in the UK. The figures given are from the Audit Bureau of Circulations and refer to the July-December 2007 period. The next figures, covering January-June 2008, will be published in August.

This just looks at magazines and specifically those magazines that choose to audit their circulation. It doesn’t include websites or newspaper supplements, but I think it is quite revealing all the same.

In the ‘Leisure Interests: Holiday & Travel’ category, the following magazines are audited: High Life, Holiday, Hotline, Livewire, Conde Nast Traveller, Orient-Express Magazine, The Sunday Times Travel Magazine and Traveller. The total circulation for all titles is an average of 857,648 per issue, down 5.4% compared with the same period in 2006.

In the category, which is rather chauvinistically entitled ‘Women’s interest: Cookery & Kitchen’, the total circulation for all issues is an average 9.4 million (9,439,937), up 1.8% year on year. The titles covered include: Asda Magazine, Tesco Magazine, Sainsbury’s Fresh Ideas, BBC Good Food, Sainsbury’s Magazine, Waitrose Food Illustrated, delicious, Olive, Easy Cook, Good Food Vegetarian Special, Easy Food and Fresh.

That’s 857,648 for travel v 9.4 million for food? That would make the food niche more than 10 times bigger than travel!

But wait! That’s not the full picture.

Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Somerfield and Waitrose are all British supermarkets and Asda, Tesco and Somerfield’s magazines are free. However, Sainsbury’s Magazine and Waitrose Food Illustrated are NOT free but sold in stores for prices close to a normal news-stand cover price.

So if you exclude the free magazines, the total average circulation is 1.4 million (1,395,577 to be precise). That’s still nearly twice the size of travel.

But it turns out the travel niche also has free magazines. High Life is BA’s in-flight magazine. Hotline is Virgin Trains’ customer magazine. Livewire is GNER (another train network)’s magazine. Orient-Express is free to customers staying in Orient-Express hotels or travelling on the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express. Holiday is a free magazine for members of RCI Holiday, which is a timeshare company. Only 1% of Traveller‘s circulation is not free.

That leaves just Conde Nast Traveller, which has an average issue circulation of 85,106 (up 0.4% from 2006), and Sunday Times Travel, which has an average circulation of 47,503, up a respectable 13.8% compared with the year before. That’s a total of 132,609, still less than a tenth of the 1.4 million paid-for food magazines.

Even if you exclude ALL supermarket magazines (even the ones that cost money) then the total number of food magazines sold is 749,008. That’s still five or six times more than 132,609.

The last thing I want to do as a travel blogger is talk down travel blogs – what I really want to do is promote the sector. But as a journalist, I am also interested in truth, and my analysis is so far leading me to believe that food is considerably bigger than travel. Many general magazines have a travel section but they also often have a cookery section. Newspapers have travel supplements but they also publish recipes, restaurant reviews and investigative features on food issues. Also, the ABC figures just refer to cookery magazines but food is a much wider category than cookery, and restaurant reviews are a big niche in the blogosphere as well.

What do you guys think? Do the UK magazine figures surprise you? Are my conclusions right? If not, why not? I would love to see some evidence to the contrary.