About Nuts

Nuts

Nuts was a British weekly lads' magazine published in London, in England, by IPC Media from January 2004 until April 2014. Sold every Tuesday and launched with the slogan promising humour when it was really needed, it was the United Kingdom's first mainstream men's weekly. Its mixture of glamour photography, football, gadgets, jokes and celebrity coverage was aimed at men aged roughly eighteen to thirty, it sold more than 100 million copies over ten years, and its final issue, its 526th edition, appeared on 29 April 2014 with British glamour model Lucy Pinder on the cover.

Nuts is inseparable from the last decade of the British lad mag era. It arrived in 2004, when monthly titles such as FHM and Loaded were already past their peaks but still powerful, and it translated their formula into a cheaper, faster weekly. It outsold its direct rival Zoo throughout their competition, peaked at more than 300,000 copies a week, and then declined with extraordinary speed as its content was undercut by free online material, changing retail policies and campaigns against the public display of lads' magazines.

Launch on 22 January 2004

Nuts first hit newsstands on 22 January 2004, published by IPC Media, later within IPC Inspire and the Time Inc. group. Its first cover star was Nell McAndrew. IPC described the target reader at launch as men aged sixteen to thirty who had become disillusioned with the tabloid press, and the editorial promise was summed up in its own shorthand as girls, gadgets, football and laughs.

The weekly frequency was the innovation. Men's lifestyle magazines in Britain had been monthlies, produced to glossy standards and sold at glossy prices. A weekly could be cheaper, more topical, more disposable and more closely tied to the week's football, television and celebrity news. Its marketing campaign at launch used the slogan about really needing something funny, positioning the magazine as light relief rather than as a style authority. The final editor was Dominic Smith.

Content and tone

Nuts combined photographs of glamour models and celebrities with football coverage, jokes, gadgets, cars and reader-oriented humour. Covers were dominated by models in swimwear or lingerie, a presentation that made the title instantly recognisable on the newsstand and, later, the focus of sustained criticism and retail restrictions. Inside, short items, lists, pictures and gags predominated over long-form journalism. The magazine was designed to be browsed quickly and shared, in workplaces, barbershops, trains and common rooms.

Celebrity access was part of its claim to mainstream status despite its lads' image. Its publisher noted on closure that figures including Prince Harry, footballers Michael Owen and Wayne Rooney and the singer Rihanna had been photographed with the magazine over its ten years. The title sold itself not as an underground product but as a weekly companion to popular British male culture at its most mainstream.

Rivalry with Zoo

Nuts' main rival was Zoo, launched by Emap, later Bauer, in the same period and aimed at much the same demographic of men aged eighteen to thirty with similar content. The two weeklies fought a direct newsstand battle for a decade, also competing with the short-lived Zip and with monthly publications such as FHM and Loaded.

Nuts always outsold Zoo. Even in the later half of 2013, after both titles had fallen steeply, the gap between them was nearly 25,000 copies per week in Nuts' favour: Nuts recorded an Audit Bureau of Circulations figure of 53,342 for July to December 2013, while Zoo had fallen to about 29,521. A decade earlier the contest had been at a different scale, with Nuts at 290,337 and later 277,269 in 2004 audits and peaking at 306,802 in 2005. To have led its sector while that sector collapsed around it was the central commercial fact of the title's later years.

Peak circulation and reach

At its peak in 2005 Nuts reached a circulation of 306,802 copies a week. Across its life it sold in excess of 100 million copies, and by its closure its publisher said it reached 1.3 million young men every week across its multiple platforms, including print, its website and other brand extensions, which at one point included a television channel, Nuts TV. The magazine enjoyed, in its publisher's words on closure, ten years at the top of its market.

That scale explains why its closure was treated as an industry event rather than a routine title review. A weekly selling more than 300,000 copies in the mid-2000s was a mass medium. A weekly selling 53,342 by late 2013, down 33.5 per cent in a single year, was a title whose audience had migrated elsewhere and whose remaining economics depended on a newsstand environment that was itself turning against it.

Retail pressure, modesty bags and the Lose the Lads Mags campaign

In 2013 the campaign groups UK Feminista and Object launched the Lose the Lads Mags campaign, arguing that lads' magazines portrayed women as dehumanised sex objects and that retailers could face legal risks under sex discrimination law from staff and customers required to handle or be exposed to them. The campaign became part of the public context in which Nuts spent its final year.

Retailers responded in different ways. The Co-operative demanded that such magazines be supplied in modesty bags to shield cover images from shoppers. Nuts and Zoo refused, and both publishers pulled the titles from Co-op stores. Circulations of both magazines then dropped by about a third year on year in the second half of 2013. Tesco moved to age-restrict sales of lads' magazines. Analysts at the time cautioned that the deeper cause of decline was the migration of readers online, where similar imagery and humour were freely available, but the retail restrictions materially reduced the titles' visibility and availability in their final months.

Failure to transfer to digital

Nuts maintained a website, nuts.co.uk, but it did not build a digital business capable of replacing print. Reporting on the proposed closure in March 2014 noted digital monthly sales of only 8,776, and observed that the magazine had failed to make the transition to a digital future because its editorial mix was available free on competing websites. That was the structural problem for the whole genre: jokes, football pictures, celebrity news and glamour imagery were among the easiest magazine contents to replicate online at no cost.

Print still mattered disproportionately to the brand's revenue and identity. When print circulation halved and then halved again, neither subscriptions, digital editions nor brand extensions could close the gap. The title's 30-day staff consultation in March 2014 was therefore conducted with a sale of the magazine left open as an alternative, but no buyer emerged to take it on as a going concern.

Closure in April 2014

In March 2014 IPC Media announced that it had entered a thirty-day consultation with staff about the potential closure of Nuts and its website, and said it was open to offers for the magazine. At the end of the consultation IPC confirmed that the brand would close. The final issue, the 526th edition, hit newsstands on Tuesday 29 April 2014, and the website shut down the following day, 30 April 2014.

Publishing director Jo Smalley thanked the Nuts team and described the title, across all its platforms, as having been enjoyed by millions of young British men every week during the previous ten years, calling it a publishing phenomenon by any definition. Coverage of the closure in national newspapers and feminist campaign publications alike treated it as a symbolic end point, though they differed sharply on whether to mourn or welcome it.

Aftermath for the lad mag sector

Nuts was the first of the major British lad mag brands to close in the final contraction. Loaded moved to online-only publication in 2015. In November 2015 Bauer announced that FHM and Zoo would cease publication at the end of that year, explicitly in a context of men's media habits moving towards mobile and social platforms. Commentators announcing those closures routinely cited Nuts' 2014 fold, and the fall of its circulation from about 300,000 at peak to about 50,000 within a decade, as the clearest single measure of the genre's collapse.

The sector's decline is generally explained by several converging causes rather than one: free online pornography and imagery, social media and viral humour sites replacing the magazine's functions, smartphones changing young men's media habits, retail restrictions on display, and a broader cultural and commercial reaction against the sexism associated with lad culture. Nuts experienced all of them within a few years.

Critical assessment and legacy

Assessments of Nuts divide sharply. To its publisher and its staff it was a phenomenally successful weekly innovation, the first mainstream men's weekly in Britain, a consistent market leader over Zoo and a title that sold more than 100 million copies. To its critics, including the Lose the Lads Mags campaigners who claimed its demise as a result of people power, it spent ten years placing sexualised images of women on supermarket shelves and normalising the treatment of women as a sum of body parts, and its closure was a sign of progress in the representation of women in media.

Both assessments agree on the underlying facts, and those facts are why Nuts retains historical interest. For exactly ten years, from 22 January 2004 to 29 April 2014, a weekly built on humour, football and glamour photography could command a mass young male audience in print. That it could no longer do so by 2014, despite still leading its direct rival, records how completely the media environment that created the lad mag had changed.