Institution

An institution can be defined as corporation, company or business which sells a product in order to make a profit out of it. In my case the product is a magazine and I will be exploring magazine institutions throughout this post.

In the UK magazines are highly popular within the mass market and the total number of consumer magazines is 2,471 with a value of around £1.4 billion. Moreover, the total number of business to business magazines is around the number of 4,395 in the UK, with around a £3.2 billion value - this is expected to reach a massive £7 billion by 2014.

A variety of platforms allow for the publishing platforms to diversify - they do this through widespread use of social media, mobiles, the internet, live events, tablets and many other means of digital technology. Through doing this, the consumer's needs are fore filled in terms of finding and detracting information - it makes life easier and quicker for the consumer and also allows information to be processed quicker and more efficiently. This idea continues to grow as magazine publishing industries expand through the purchase of independent magazines - this in turn leads to money consumption for the institution due to the independent magazine being exposed to a larger audience. This means that more copies are sold to a wider target audience. Publishing institutions can often be a range of independent magazine which are owned by a larger publishing firm which are then often owned by some of the largest institution in the industry. The correct audiences are then reached by the institutions, however on a larger scale - this in turn allows for diversification to be created through different media platforms in different sections of the conglomeration.

The largest consumer magazine publisher in the UK, IPC Media, has an audience of 26 million UK adults - two thirds of these are women and 42% are men. IPC Media has over 25 million users across the world each month and they are split into three different publishing divisions. The first of these three is IPC Connect - IPC Connect publish woman weekly magazine and they provide digital media in areas of fashion, celebrity, lifestyle, entertainment and TV. IPC Connect reaches approximately 9.4 million women every month which is roughly 49% of the market place.

Southbank publish upmarket woman weekly magazines such as Marie Claire and many others in the same market place. Inspire are responsible for publishing men's weekly magazines such as The Field and Rugby Weekly.

Bauer Media Group are a German publishing company that's based in Hamburg. They mainly focus on woman's weekly magazines, however they also publish television listing magazines. A popular brand that's owned by Bauer Media Group is Bella, Take A Break and many others from a similar market place.
Some other popular Bauer Media Group brands include Q magazine, Kerrang! and they also have an involvement with the radio and television industry.

BBC magazines, are a commercial subsidiary of the BBC and create magazines mainly based around shows shown on the BBC, however they also create magazines which challenge mainstream magazines, such as BBC music. 

I think that I would choose IPC Media because their portfolio of magazines currently doesn't consist of magazines in the same genre as mine. This would be good for my magazine because it would give my magazine more chance of being published. Moreover, it may be that IPC Media would insert more money into my magazine then it perhaps would if they published others of the same genre in the market place.