Media of South Africa - Magazines

Magazines

See also: List of magazines in South Africa

South Africa has a very robust magazine industry with an estimated 280 locally-published titles available; imported magazines add to this number considerably. The industry's annual turnover in 1998 was estimated to be about R 1.7 billion.

While the mass consumer market sector is dominated by only a few publishers (Naspers, Perskor, CTP Holdings, TML), the specialist consumer and trade & technical sectors are very fragmented and contain a large number of small- and medium-sized publishers in addition to the aforementioned major players.

As could be expected from South Africa's recent history, its magazine market is (still) characterised by definite differences in the readership of magazines amongst the country's different race groups. A decline in traditional mass consumer magazine titles versus the growth of specialist titles also characterizes the industry, as does the growth of magazines specifically aimed at black South Africans, such as Drum.

Naspers is the dominant player in the mass consumer magazine sector and sells about two thirds of all the magazines read in South Africa, including imported magazines. The company publishes large national titles such as Fair Lady, Sarie, Insig, SA Sports Illustrated, Kickoff, Huisgenoot, You and Drum. The Afrikaans language family magazine Huisgenoot has the largest circulation of any South African magazine and is followed by You, its English language version; these two magazines have a combined circulation of almost one million copies a week. Fair Lady and Sarie are South Africa's largest selling English- and Afrikaans-language women's magazines, respectively.

Other large mass market publishers are Perskor (Republican Press), CTP Holdings and Times Media. Specialist consumer magazines are also published by the aforementioned publishers, as well as by Primedia Publishing, Kagiso Media and Ramsay Son & Parker. In the trade and technical sector Primedia is the largest publisher.

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