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Only GQ and Esquire, which have maintained more upmarket images, remain in a sector that once also included the monthly Loaded, Maxim, Arena and Front titles and the weekly Nuts magazine.
Loaded, which started the ‘lads’ mag’ boom in the 1990s, published its last edition in March of this year, following the closure of Nuts in 2014.
Bauer Media gave no reason for the suspension of the monthly FHM or the weekly Zoo, but sales of both titles have plummeted over the last decade after the high circulation figures seen in the 1990s and the early 2000s.
FHM was originally launched in 1986 as the quarterly For Him Magazine, but Bauer decided to take on IPC when it launched Loaded in 1994 by making FHM a monthly.
Copy sales peaked at more than 500,000 in 2004, when FHM established itself as the leading title in the sector. Attempts by Bauer over the last six or seven years to take FHM more upmarket failed to arrest the rapid decline in sales to below 100,000 copies.
Source: Independent Retail News
