InStyle once again has beat out Vogue to capture the coveted fashion magazine ad page crown for 2013.
InStyle, with a strong December, finished with 2,810.47 ad pages, up 4.72 percent, according to the tallies that Media Industry Newsletter is slated to release on Friday.
That means ad pages have grown each year since Ariel Foxman took over as the top editor of the Time Inc. title in 2008.
“For five straight years, he’s had the inside track on what works,” said InStyle publisher Karin Tracy. It also suggests InStyle was not slowed by the stunning resignation of publisher Connie Anne Phillips in May — who managed to skip out and land at Condé Nast as Glamour publisher.
Tracy managed to keep the momentum going — although the big hurdle may be next year when she has the entire year to herself.
Vogue, helmed by Editor in Chief Anna Wintour, still has more fashion pages than its rival, but when other ad categories were added to the mix, it ended up in second place with 2,694.64 total ad pages, up 3.58 percent.
Third place went to Elle, the Hearst title that has emerged as the second-biggest money maker in the company, with 2,501.65 ad pages, up 1.9 percent, while its sister title in the Hearst empire, Harper’s Bazaar, posted the biggest gain of any of the fashion books, up 12.53 percent, to 2,071.47.
“Fashion magazines don’t face as much competition from digital as other categories,” said Steve Cohn, editor-in -chief of MIN.
“People buy the fashion magazines as much for the ads as they do for the editorial,” he said.