A Magazine Growth Market

Magazine readership may be waning in Indonesia, but that hasn’t deterred Lagardère Active from launching its second title there, Elle Decoration.

Rising interest in fashion, beauty and lifestyle tends to go hand-in-hand with economic growth, explains Lagardère Active’s CEO for Greater China and Southeast Asia, Victor Visot.

This makes Indonesia, where ad growth is being powered by a robust economy, Southeast Asia’s most attractive magazine market, though opportunities are also emerging in Vietnam, Visot adds. A local edition of Elle has been published in Indonesia for two years.

Indonesia is currently home to over 500 magazine titles, read by 17% of adults in towns and 6% in the countryside, more than the number of people going online.

Most major titles are experiencing sharp drops in readership however, and the medium’s reach is declining.

Steady ad growth
The sector will still keep pace with the market to maintain its share of adspend for the next two to three years, according to estimates from Media Partners Asia, publisher of The Asia Media Journal. Ad revenues are expected to grow from US$43 million this year to reach US$60 million in 2013.

Franchised versions are also increasingly taking the lead over local titles, while niche interest publications are outperforming general interest reads.

New titles will still have to actively market themselves as worth paying for, proposes Jaydeep Chaudhuri, managing director of media agency MEC Indonesia, with foreign titles ideally offering more than translated content.

“Audiences tend to gravitate to platforms that do not have significant recurring costs, such as terrestrial TV, radio, internet and mobile; unless there is really differentiated content that is relevant, and the notional or social cost of not having that information is significant.”

Nevertheless, Indonesia is proving to be a more receptive market to overseas titles than India, another boom market for magazines which took far longer to open up, Chaudhuri notes.

Increasing competition
Lagardère isn’t the only magazine publisher eyeing growth in Indonesia. SPH Magazines is launching its interior decoration monthly, Home & Décor, in April, the first overseas outing for the magazine, presenting additional competition for Elle Decoration.

SPH already publishes six localized titles in Indonesia, with different publishers: Female, Female Brides, Her World, Her World Brides, HWM and The Peak.

Business publisher Forbes has also signed a deal to launch a localized Indonesian edition later this year, adding to local Asian Forbes titles in China, India and Korea.

This is an edited extract from an article published in the Q1 2010 edition of The Asia Media Journal.