The age of the lads’ mag is over with new, ‘gendered’ publications taking a far more considered, artistic and socially conscious approach to their subject matter
In the late 1990s, Loaded magazine was the brash, rowdy and wildly successful epitome of the British lads’ magazine. Half-naked women adorned its covers and crude, funny blokes filled its pages. At its height, in the second half of 1998, it sold an average of 457,318 copies a month. By 2010, that figure had plummeted to 53,591. Today, Loaded barely limps on in a re-booted edition and its offspring, Nuts magazine, was killed off in 2014. In the same year, Loaded’s American soulmate Maxim was sold for between $10m and $15m, a fraction of what it was worth in 2007 when it was sold, along with Blender and Stuff, for $250m. FHM stopped publishing in the US in 2006.
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