Media

Maxim magazine sold, could be headed to TV

Maxim, the laddie magazine that once defined the sector, has been sold after a prolonged sale process.
Darden Media Group, an Atlanta-based concern led by retired UPS executive Calvin Darden, has bought the battered title and plans to use the brand to form a TV channel and a record label.
Darden aims to have the channel in 35 million homes by the end of the year and already has an agreement with a pay-TV operator, according to an interview with WSJ.com.
Terms were not disclosed, but sources pegged the sale price as low as $20 million — reflecting the slide from its once-robust heyday. Last year, ad pages plunged 22 percent.
While Darden outlined ambitious plans to expand and revive the Maxim brand in announcing the deal on Friday, it’s not clear what happens to the magazine that started it all.

In some quarters, media insiders expect Darden to outsource the magazine to an existing magazine publisher.
Starting almost from the moment it was introduced in the US in 1995, Maxim for years was one of the fastest-growing men’s magazines in the country. Its successful recipe included scantily clad women on the cover and a heavy dose of irreverent humor.
But in recent years, it has foundered.
Darden bought the title from Alpha Media, controlled by private-equity giant Cerberus Capital, among others. Cerberus and other creditors ended up as the default owners in 2009 after Steve Rattner and his partners at Quadrangle Capital defaulted on a $160 million loan.
Quadrangle bought the magazine two years earlier from Felix Dennis for $250 million — but then sailed it directly into the economic hurricane that was the Great Recession, which destroyed ad revenue.
Dennis introduced the American version of the title in 1995, based on a popular British magazine of the same name.
Although it was not the biggest of the so-called laddie magazines, it soon became a big hit in the US.
“I was the first guy into the desert with a beer truck,” Dennis once commented on the magazine’s meteoric early rise.
Aside from the recession, the magazine has been overrun by the rise of even more-risqué fare available to young men for free in digital formats.

The monthly magazine is believed to be set to lose up to $5 million this year. Because of the losses and declining newsstand appeal, magazine publishers avoided the bidding process that kicked off in March.
“Maxim is an incredible brand and we look forward to investing in and building upon its leading global platform,” Darden said in a statement. “Although the publishing industry has seen seismic shifts over the past several years, the opportunities to create powerful, transmedia brands that engage consumers and advertisers on multiple platforms is significantly on the rise.”