Introduction
Fashion and beauty magazines emerged in the 60s of the last century, but we have to wait until the 80s, coinciding with the opening of our country to the outside world, to be able to talk about the boom of this type of press. It was at that time when the big international titles -Elle, Vogue or Cosmopolitan- landed in the Spanish market, overwhelming national magazines that did not manage to win the battle against the big international publishers.
Since then, the fashion and beauty magazine market has undergone various changes, such as the adaptation to pocket format, which reached the young women’s press with Ragazza in 1999, and later with Cosmopolitan in February 2002; although it was the launch in Spain of Glamour, in mini or pocket format, which was the true catalyst for most of these titles to decide to go for this format.
The economic crisis
Subsequently, the global economic crisis, which affected our country in early 2008, made possible the emergence of low-cost magazines with titles such as Cuore Stilo, ¡Hola! Fashion, Grazia and Divinity, which mimic the high-end women’s magazines, but with more affordable fashion and beauty content.
The digital crisis
Nor can we lose sight of what has been the great crisis of the media, especially the print media: the digital crisis. The emergence of the Internet will mean a change in the way of consuming media; but also in the ways and lifestyles. In fact, we cannot think of our society today without thinking of the Internet. «The Internet is the fabric of our lives right now. It is not the future, it is the present. It is a medium for everything, interacting with society as a whole» (Castells, 2001, p. 1).
The Internet has been configured as a new means of communication to which the rest of the traditional media have had to adapt their strategy (Canga, 2001). It offers us another way of consuming, with a constant renewal of information, with free, instantaneous and updated content; something with which the paper format cannot compete.
Thus, the digital crisis will mean a new restructuring of the media landscape and a redistribution of market share. Advertisers, although initially reluctant to invest in online media, are soon noticing the advantages of this new medium, especially because of its large audience, which is constantly growing, with figures that worldwide reach 4,388 million Internet users, according to the 2019 Digital Report. «The number of unique users on the Internet is continuously growing, and worldwide not only in Spain» (Ayestarán, 2011, p. 141).
Fashion and beauty magazines are currently within a technological and communicative context that has little to do with that of years ago. Almost nothing is left of the media market in which some print titles compete with others; since the development and democratization of the Internet have diversified the modes of communication and have eliminated borders, favoring the creation of platforms and websites. Now print magazines also compete with fashion and beauty blogs and digital women’s magazines, two products that offer some of the same content as traditional women’s magazines.
Online magazines, the preferred choice of young people
In fact, studies show that young people prefer online media to traditional media when it comes to getting information. This is also confirmed by Ganzabal (2007a), for whom it is a fact that under-30s are abandoning the reading of print media in favor of digital media and multimedia content, and that this circumstance is noticeable, not only in newspapers, but also in a more specialized product such as magazines. «Young people live with screens in a spontaneous and natural way. They have been born and raised in this environment, (…), they have learned before to handle the technological interface rather than to read and write» (Gabelas and Marta, 2011, p. 11). Ayestarán (2001) also agrees:
Those under 30 years of age abandon print media dazzled by the possibilities of multimedia and the presence of their magazines in the network. This audience segment is becoming more than essential both to open up to this new market and to maintain their position in it. Another way for these types of publications to avoid losing market share and gain access to new readers is the introduction and generalization of their content online. Thus, the large publishing groups have been including the websites of these magazines. Their use is so logical that nowadays it is unthinkable that these publications do not have their corresponding website.
In the new social scenario of the 21st century, social networks are acquiring great relevance, becoming the main protagonists of digital society (Caldevilla, 2010). A protagonist that is increasing every day, as reflected by the figures that refer to the existence of 3,484 million users of social networks worldwide, which represents 43% of the world population (Hotsuite, 2019).
Among the reasons driving the media to adapt to social networks, Lara (2008) points out three aspects:
The profile of the media audience is changing. The traditional media reader tends to age, so it is necessary to adapt to the new communication and information needs of young people, who were born in the digital era and for whom social networks are part of their digital identity.
Network users are growing in number and in time of permanence.
It is a new way of connecting with society, which enjoys greater trust than the traditional media, which have lost credibility in recent years. It also allows interaction with the audience and between different users, reinforcing the concept of community.
The new challenge for the media is to «capture new audiences and convert their audiences into social networks» (Lara, 2008). Flores (2009, p. 75) also points out that «in social media, communities replace audiences».
Which social networks are the most used?
The networks with more followers and more publications are textual networks -Facebook and Twitter-, however, the level of engagement and growth is higher in visual networks. Instagram in terms of engagement and YouTube in growth, something that is not surprising considering the great importance that this network currently has. From this we can deduce that the video network is configured as a support that, although it currently does not seem to have enough attention from women’s magazines, they should not overlook, among other aspects due to the growth it is experiencing in recent years and the one it seems to be experiencing in the future.
The interaction of publications in all cases is very low, but it is curious that, although women’s magazines devote their efforts to textual networks, Instagram is the network that has a higher engagement by users. In addition, Vogue is quite active in another visual network such as Pinterest. These data reflect how these magazines have realized the power of the image and the possibilities of these younger social networks that are better adapted to their themes and content.
We can conclude that, although high-end women’s magazines on paper focus mainly on fashion and beauty content and give great importance to image over text -something that is also reflected in their online editions- the social networks with the greatest reach are not, for the moment, visual networks, as we proposed in our initial hypothesis, but the networks that have the most users not only nationally but worldwide: Facebook and Twitter. However, we do notice that, even in these more textual networks, the importance of images is fundamental for these headers with contents that are accompanied by images and videos and which also provoke the most reactions in their followers.
