Why not an Irish teen magazine?

There are a few Irish-produced magazines with a good number of teenage readers

There are a few Irish-produced magazines with a good number of teenage readers. Maybe you look at d'side, or Image, or even the RTE Guide.

However, while there are a few narrow-focus Irish magazines aimed at young readers - a Boyzone fanzine, say - there are not really any publications made in Ireland for a mass teenage market; the target readership for Irish magazines is generally broader. The teen titles that Irish teenagers buy are, basically, British.

Maybe you can think of some reasons for this. Mostly they boil down to money. While you and your fellow mid-teens are starting to shape up as consumers - of music, beauty products, computer games - and obviously some advertisers want your attention, you just haven't got the spending power of your older sisters and brothers. Compare an adult-oriented magazine such as Vogue to a popular teen magazine like J17: Vogue is packed with ads, while J17 has far fewer.

In order to afford to publish a glossy, attractive and colourful magazine, a publisher needs a lot of money: ideally, he or she gets that by having a lot of readers and a lot of advertisers, like the RTE Guide.

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But a magazine can get by with either one or the other. Image, for example, has a relatively small circulation of 25,000, but its readers are reckoned to be a strong market for advertisers, so the magazine thrives. Sugar, on the other hand, has a circulation of 415,000. Obviously advertisers would be pretty happy to reach such a large audience, even of 13-year-olds, but when that many magazines are being sold at £1.70 a pop (far more in Ireland, of course, when the excessive mark-up is taken into account) Sugar can make bucket-loads of cash before it starts worrying about advertising revenue. (Sugar also gets companies giving it tons of products for free, which means it has low costs for its spreads on the hottest Valentine's gifts or the latest hair serums).

So for a magazine aimed at consumers like you who aren't full grown, a large circulation is essential. And there are simply not enough teenage magazine-buyers in Ireland to sustain an attractive colour glossy.

Anyway, would you want to buy an Irish teen magazine? Do you think it might be too limited, too local in its outlook? Does teen culture cross national boundaries? Is the teen perspective on life, love, parents, fashion, music, sports etc, the same wherever you go?