Does The Maxim Magazine Brand Have A Future?

Maxim magazine is in the news, but not for anything it published. Investor Andrew Fox has taken to the press to complain that the publishing brand won't sell itself to him, and announced a $40 million hostile takeover bid. He says that without his plan to save it, the magazine will be dead in months. The magazine responded by calling Fox a "self-aggrandizing gossip" and insists his forecast has no merit. The question is, which part has no merit?

Founded by UK publishing magnate Felix Dennis in the '90s, Maxim changed the entire men's magazine publishing industry. The vortex created by the Maxim was so strong it literally changed the brands of all the magazines that competed with it. Before Maxim, magazines like GQ, Details and Esquire rarely featured half-naked women on their covers; lowest-common-denominator "listicles" were not a foundation block of their content, as they are today.

But Maxim became the Icarus of lad mags, and flew too high. It overindulged on questionable brand extensions likehair dye (see above) and a Maxim Living line that included duvets (though Maxim's poster child Tyler Durden insists a duvet is "just a blanket").

The sector it helped popularize took off on the web, where Maxim now competes with hundreds of websites, like Don Chavez and Manofest, offering and endless parade of barely-concealed nipples and dumb lists. Compare those sites to Maxim's. It's difficult to even see a difference. Maxim created the very competition that is now killing it.

So it appears that the "meritless" part of Mr. Fox's claim is the time-frame. Maxim's ad pages have been falling every year since 2002. Since 2008, ad pages fell 25% -- 4% more than monthly magazines as a whole. And while it did see a recent 4% increase in subscriptions, such numbers are often increased (sometimes at great cost to the publisher, because of discounts and marketing costs) to compensate for a newsstand drop, an 18% fall in Maxim's case.

"Maxim" still has a great deal of brand recognition. The brand today is not exactly weak, but it is washed out. But what exactly is the "Maxim brand," and how does it differentiate itself from so much similar noise? Nobody seems to know.