Every Wednesday, commuters in the UK can always find this fashion and beauty magazine Stylist for free on their journey to work. Published by Shortlist Media, Stylist is a free weekly magazine targeting at 20 to 40 years old female. It aims at providing the latest and insightful contents related to fashion, beauty, culture, career and entertainment. Despite from the printed magazine, it is also available on the its website as well as the app through subscription.
Browsing through the Stylist website, we can see that besides the main sections under the headline, there are various categories of content top down from the menu. With the abundant posts under each category, it can keep readers engaged as much as possible with the website.
Says Lisa Smosarski, the editor-in-chief of Stylist magazine.
Except for the fashion and beauty section which are similar with other magazines targets at female, there are several distinctive sections are especially in correspondence with what Lisa stressed. Career which provides guidance for women in current workforce. Under Her Eye which includes commentary of film and industry and interviews through female lens, and People which mainly introduces excellent female figures. It emphasizes the value and power of women in modern society, which is also essential to meet the interest and preference of its target customers. In this way, Stylist make a good balance between its uniqueness and familiarity of female-oriented content which can satisfy the diverse taste of its readers to the greatest extent.
Among these posts, it is not difficult to find out that there is large amount of branded content as other magazines. For example, under the recommended reading column Our Picks, there are five articles classified into different categories and all of them are actually advertising of Netflix, products of homeware, shoes and cosmetics respectively. It is in consonance with the tone and style of Stylist to merge the product sales into the trendy topics, and obviously the magazine could provide plenty space of branded content.
There is no ground for blame since Stylist belongs to the enterprise whose ultimate goal is maximizing profit and advertising is where the revenue comes from. Supported by the solid advertising model, it tries to attract as much as readers with the high-quality content which could compared to other paid-for magazine, along with the free distribution. With the efficient printing and distribution, each week Stylist can reach around 400,000 readers. This makes it influential and gain more profits from advertisers and brands. Nowadays, with the strong readers base, Stylist operates in a subscription model. On one hand, readers can reach more abundant content through paying for subscription online or on its app, which also increase the revenue. On the other hand, there are still lots of free content available online to attract new readers. Stylist tries to minimize its churn by remaining the original customers with premium content as well as raise the number of new fans by free content.
On this circumstance, the readers’ interests and the brands determine the media content Stylist can produce. However, the preferences of customers are not always in line with the brands. Stylist heavily relies on the advertising to support all the production and operation costs, so it is reasonable to doubt that if Stylist could continuously keep its readability and reliability without fully compromising to the capital controls. It brings the challenge for Stylist to figure out how to find the balance between the commercial interest of brands and the benefit for its readers.