About Landlust

Landlust

Landlust is the most successful German magazine launch of the twenty-first century. Published in Münster, the bimonthly lifestyle magazine celebrates "the most beautiful sides of country life" — cooking, gardening, crafting, decorating and nature — and grew within seven years from a standing start to more than a million copies sold per issue, making it one of the ten largest magazines in Germany. Its subtitle could hardly be more programmatic: Landlust – Die schönsten Seiten des Landlebens.

Overview

The magazine belongs to the living, garden and cooking segment, where it has been the market leader since the end of 2009. Its subject is the romantic, hands-on side of rural life: seasonal recipes, garden knowledge, handicrafts from knitting to woodwork, decoration ideas and portraits of country living. The presentation is distinctive — natural, unpretentious, authentic, with high production values and knowledgeable, practical articles. Cultural commentators have read the title as a revival of the Heimat concept in contemporary Germany; the Observer's Philip Oltermann counted it among five objects defining modern Germany. Others were less kind: Der Spiegel once sneered, "When rubbish is turned into a magazine, it calls itself Landlust" — a gibe that only underlined how seriously the establishment took the upstart.

History

Landlust was launched in October 2005 by the Landwirtschaftsverlag Münster, the agricultural publishing house, appearing every two months with some 200 pages per issue. The project had been prepared from 2004 by an in-house project group; the founding editor-in-chief was Ute Frieling-Huchzermeyer, who had grown up on a farm in the Osnabrück region, studied agriculture, trained as an agricultural engineer and worked her way up through the publisher's specialist journal top agrar from trainee to section head. She led the magazine from its launch until May 2020 — fifteen years that made her one of the defining magazine editors of her generation.

The circulation curve is the stuff of publishing legend. The first year sold 50,000 copies; by 2007 the figure had risen to 200,000. In the third quarter of 2008 the magazine reported 377,952 sold copies — up 19 percent on the previous quarter and nearly double the previous year, with single-copy sales up 120 percent to 220,661 and the "hard-sold" share of single sales plus subscriptions above 97 percent. By late 2009 nearly 550,000 copies were sold; in 2010 the circulation reached 648,866 and then 700,000. In April 2012 Landlust passed the million mark in sold copies — seven years after launch — and in the third quarter of 2013 it sold 1,041,069 copies, ranking among Germany's ten largest magazines by readership; the second quarter of 2014 brought 1,024,033. In 2009 the title already counted among the twenty best-selling newsstand magazines in the country. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung marked the phenomenon in September 2012 with a full portrait of the founder-editor under the headline "Vom Glück des Gedeihens" (on the joy of thriving) — an unusual honour for a practitioner of the supposedly lowly service-magazine craft.

Since July 2016 Landlust has been published by the Deutsche Medien-Manufaktur GmbH & Co. KG (DMM) in Münster, a subsidiary of the Landwirtschaftsverlag founded in 2016 as a joint venture with Gruner + Jahr. In June 2020 Sinja Schütte succeeded Ute Frieling-Huchzermeyer as editor-in-chief. Current IVW figures (2/2026) record a sold circulation of 612,563 copies with 615,565 distributed — still the commanding leader of its segment, though below the million-copy peaks of the early 2010s. The print edition carries the ISSN 1863-8074 and sells at a cover price of 5.20 euros.

Content and Concept

A Landlust issue is organised around the seasons and the practical arts of country living. Cooking features emphasise seasonal, often traditional recipes; gardening articles combine plant knowledge with hands-on advice; crafting sections range from knitting to seasonal decoration; nature writing and country portraits supply atmosphere. The editorial voice is competent and warm rather than ironic — the magazine takes its readers' interests at face value and serves them with evident expertise.

The concept's genius lay in addressing an audience the metropolitan magazine industry had overlooked: women (and men) who live outside the big cities, own their homes, keep gardens and value tradition, quality and brands. The magazine never condescends to country life and never apologises for it; its "unmistakable naturalness and unique authenticity", in the publisher's phrase, is the product of editors who mostly come from rural backgrounds themselves. In November 2015 a British edition of Landlust was launched, testing whether the formula travels.

Coverage and Audience

The readership is among the most precisely profiled in German publishing: well-off and willing to spend, nature-loving and value-conservative, strongly oriented to brands and quality. Most readers are between 40 and 60 years old; 72 percent are women; 85 percent live in places with fewer than 100,000 inhabitants — roughly twice the rate of the general population; 70 percent live in their own homes and 83 percent have a garden. Current reach stands at 3.23 million readers (AWA 2025). For advertisers, the title offers access to a high-spending, brand-loyal audience at a 2026 rate-card price of 82,000 euros for a full page — evidence of the magazine's continued commercial weight.

Ownership

Landlust is published by the Deutsche Medien-Manufaktur (DMM) in Münster, the joint venture founded in 2016 by the Landwirtschaftsverlag Münster and Gruner + Jahr, in which the agricultural publisher holds the reins. The Landwirtschaftsverlag itself is one of Germany's hundred largest media companies, with roots in the farming press — the weekly Wochenblatt, the magazine top agrar (since 1972), profi for agricultural technology (since 1989) and specialist titles such as Elite for dairy farmers. Its owners are the Westfälisch-Lippischer Landwirtschaftsverband, the Rheinisch-Westfälischer Genossenschaftsverband and the Stiftung Westfälische Landschaft — an ownership structure that explains the publisher's patience: as a 2009 press portrait put it, the publishing owners have staying power, and the editors are given time to research rather than subjected to exaggerated cost pressure.

The LV's digital and diversification history frames the Landlust story: the online address and product finder agripool.de and the used-machinery exchange traktorpool launched in 2000, the equestrian platform rimondo followed about a decade later, and the magazines einfach hausgemacht (2013) and Stark (2016) extended the consumer portfolio. When Gruner + Jahr was restructured under RTL Deutschland, its rural title Landleben was sold to the Landwirtschaftsverlag and the DMM — consolidating Münster's position as the capital of German country-living publishing.

Digital Presence

The magazine's website, landlust.de, deliberately keeps a limited profile: it covers service offerings and, above all, the online shop, where subscriptions, back issues and brand products are sold. English-language observers have noted the restraint — the brand's energy flows overwhelmingly into the print object, the 200-page bimonthly volume that readers collect and keep. Newsletters and a measured social-media presence support the subscription business. In an industry racing toward digital, Landlust remains a striking counterexample: a magazine whose authority rests on paper, seasonality and the trust of readers who recognise their own lives in its pages. From 50,000 copies in 2005 to more than a million within seven years, its trajectory remains the benchmark against which German magazine launches are measured — and a reminder that the most powerful editorial ideas are often the simplest ones, beautifully executed. The magazine's bimonthly rhythm, matched to the seasons it celebrates, keeps each issue an event — a 200-page volume its readers collect rather than discard.