Stylist, Just Another Magazine?

The Stylist magazine was launched in the UK in 2009 and is a free revue distributed in tube stations in few UK big cities, including London. They want to offer to their audience – women mostly – a weekly, accessible, but, above all, free content. And they need advertisement to be their source of revenue for this to happen.

As Stylist is a free magazine, their primary goal is not the audience but the advertising content in the magazine, which is their unique source of revenue. Therefore, they adopt a quantitative mindset on which the idea to make profit from advertising relies. To make it more ‘readable’ and to introduce a form of ‘advertised content’ in the revue in order to avoid an excessively heavy amount of direct advertising, Stylist resorts to three different types of advertisement: 

• Direct advertisement (which consists on actual publicity content)
• Product placement (which consists on featuring various products in articles –i.e. beauty articles about lipstick, creams etc.—) 
• Direct promotion (which consists on creating partnerships with events, or brands)

Even though a quite striking unbalance between the advertising content and the informative content first comes to mind regarding the structure of the revue, the audience still remains at the center of their business model, as the content has to be delivered to their audience in order for advertisers to make profit. If one page out of two in the magazine is direct advertising, the rest of it does offer a variety of content, decently written, that display a rather appealing substance to the readers. For example, the fact that only one page out of the whole magazine is dedicated to actual news can appear as shocking; however, it is also part of the business strategy of the revue, as Stylist distinguish itself from an actual newspapers, as Lisa Smosarski -Stylist magazine editor-in-chief-  argues. They deliberately aim to a more easily readable content so as to appeal to a broader audience. Moreover, by aiming to a wider audience, the magazine also serves its purpose to make the biggest profit from advertising possible, as the audience is actually what makes advertising valuable. Consequently, they ought to make the content they provide the most general and the most appealing possible, as they need to grab the attention of the broadest audience they can possibly get in order to make a good profit from their business model. 

Furthermore, the way they display the brand ‘Stylist’ is another element of their business model. Even though the audience is not an end in itself, they still need that audience to read their content for advertisers to make profit and therefore keep providing for the magazine. The fact that they target women, is an interesting strategy that make the readers feel specifically targeted and preferred, and thus makes the content more appealing to them. Furthermore, even though their intriguing website slogan, “Feminism, Fashion, Beauty, Lifestyle Trends & News” reveals a certain superficiality of content, this hotchpotch of catchy words is also part of their strategy, as it would grab the attention of a woman looking for a rather superficial but diverting read on their way to work. The content they provide is therefore carefully calculated as an entertaining, easy and catchy content –such as interviews with celebrities, lifestyle, beauty or fashion advices and so forth– that would highly appeal to an audience on the go. 

In the end, Stylist illustrates that, even in an advertising-based revue, the audience is still vital to its business model, as they receive the information displayed by the magazine and therefore enable advertising to become profitable. They demonstrate how the heavily advertised content of Stylist still manage to appeal to their audience by balancing it off with a variety of entertaining and decently written content.