Drop in magazine advertising halts in second-quarter as marketing budgets come back

Drop in magazine advertising halts in 2Q

NEW YORK — U.S. magazines recorded a slight gain in advertising pages during the second quarter as businesses began to restore their marketing budgets. It was the first quarterly increase in two years.

According to the Publishers Information Bureau, magazines sold about 43,000 ad pages collectively during the second quarter, up 0.8 percent from a year ago.

As a whole, magazines have a long road to recovery. Ad pages fell 26 percent last year.

But some individual titles fared better than the pack. Vanity Fair climbed 30 percent in the second quarter, OK Weekly was up 37 percent and Seventeen was up 22 percent.

Even Playboy, which drew attention this week as founder Hugh Hefner proposed to take its parent company private, saw a big jump — up nearly 54 percent.