289 U.S. magazines reported that they’d sold 7.9 million digital replica editions in the last six months of 2012. That’s 2.4 percent of total circulation — up from less than 1 percent in the second half of 2011, and up from 1.7 percent in the first six months of this year. (AAM’s definition of a digital replica is that it contains “the same editorial and photojournalism as the national print edition,” though that material can be arranged differently on a tablet; nearly all digital magazines fall into this category.)

The growth looks more impressive on an individual title level, where some magazines made huge gains in digital copies: Game Informer, already by far the top magazine by digital circulation, increased that figure by 89 percent, while Cosmopolitan upped its digital circulation by nearly 40 percent in the second half of the year. Two Reader’s Digest titles – Reader’s Digest and Taste of Home — saw triple-digit-percentage growth of their digital editions, both entering the top 10 for the first time. The growth isn’t all paid: Reader’s Digest, for example, is offering print subscribers a free six-month iPad subscription. But Hearst sells digital and print subscriptions separately.

Here are the top 25 U.S. consumer magazines by digital circulation as of December 31, 2012, and how much that circulation grew (or shrank) over the first six months of the year. The Alliance for Audited Media cautions that these are preliminary figures, subject to audit.

1. Game Informer (GameStop), digital circulation: 2,305,816 (+89% over first half of 2012)
   
2. Maxim (Alpha Media Group): 259,529 (-8.9%)
3. Cosmopolitan (Hearst): 254,751 (+37.2%)
4. National Geographic (National Geographic): 160,077 (+18.9%)
5. Poder Hispanic (Televisa): 149,838 (-12.3%)
6. Reader’s Digest (Reader’s Digest): 147,149 (+248.8%)
7. Taste of Home (Reader’s Digest): 103,961 (+243.9%)
8. Popular Science (Bonnier): 98,389 (+5.8%)
9. ESPN the Magazine (ESPN): 92,197 (+20.4%)
10. OK! (American Media): 88,347 (+86.7%)
11. Parenting (Bonnier): 87,253 (+16.7%)
12. Men’s Health (Rodale): 85,842 (+44.2%)
13. O, the Oprah Magazine (Hearst): 84,632 (+4.2%)
14. Wired (Condé Nast): 84,118 (+22.3%)
15. Us Weekly (Wenner Media): 81,611 (+40.8%)
16. Nylon (Jaclynn B. Jarrett): 77,469 (+2.5%)
17. GQ (Condé Nast): 74,806  (+24.6%)
18. Food Network Magazine (Hearst): 67,727 (+65.1%)
19. Women’s Health (Rodale): 66,555 (+29.5%)
20. Star (American Media): 59,903 (+297%)
21. New Yorker (Condé Nast): 59,471 (+66.7%)
22. Esquire (Condé Nast Hearst): 57,795 (+41.7%)
23. Martha Stewart Living (Time Inc. Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia): 56,068 (+28.7%)
24. Glamour (Condé Nast): 53,794 (+56.8%)
25. Vanity Fair (Condé Nast): 53,735 (+47.6%)

Print:

• Paid subscriptions (up 1.1 percent) and total paid and verified circulation (down 0.1 percent) are basically unchanged since the first half of 2011.
• But single-copy sales are down 9.6 percent.

Digital:

• Digital replicas (which essentially replicate the editorial and advertising content of the print edition — here are the guidelines) make up just 1.7 percent of total circulation. That’s up from less than one percent last year.
• Readers are downloading more digital editions — half of audited titles (258) reported over 5.4 million digital replica editions sold in the first half of this year. Last year, 232 magazines had reported two million digital replica sales.

ABC spokeswoman Susan Kantor says magazines won’t report non-replica digital editions (ie. apps) for another couple of weeks, but those are unlikely to move the needle:

“In the last period, only a handful of publications reported non-replica, so we’d estimate the figures wouldn’t vary that much.”

Top 15 magazines by digital replica circulation

1. Game Informer Magazine (GameStop): 1,218,634
2. Maxim (Dennis Alpha Media Group) 284,824
3. Cosmopolitan (Hearst): 185,673
4. Poder Hispanic (Televisa Publishing): 170,868
5. National Geographic (National Geographic): 134,656
6. Popular Science (Bonnier): 93,037
7. O, the Oprah Magazine (Hearst): 81,259
8. ESPN the Magazine (ESPN): 76,600
9. Nylon (Jaclynn B. Jarrett): 75,600
10. Parenting (Time Inc. Bonnier): 74,790
11. Wired (Condé Nast): 68,776
12. GQ (Condé Nast): 60,031
13. Men’s Health (Rodale): 59,536
14. Women’s Health (Rodale) :51,403
15. Electronic House (EH Publishing): 50,098

Meanwhile, Maxim is a mess. It is now owned by Cerberus Capital, the PE firm that got it by default last month. Maxim’s shell parent is Alpha Media Group, which at one time included Blender magazine; the music mag closed down in March and is now online-only. Cerberus has no intention of keeping Maxim, and is looking to flip it for whatever it can get.

Both companies have been hit badly by the availability of racier and more hardcore adult content free online. At Playboy, the company started exploring strategic options earlier this year as Christie Hefner left her CEO post; it was reportedly asking for about $300 million, a price that would scare off any interested buyer in this market, particularly given its low visibility on the print side. Maxim has a younger-skewing audience, though, of course, much less then its heyday.

Both are strong brands internationally, and both have done various line extensions with varying degrees of success. Dressing them up together might help make a better case for a buyer, especially an international one (a Russian billionaire, perhaps?). That’s at least the sentiment among some of the execs I have spoken to inside and outside the two companies. No formal talks at this point, from what I understand, and Flanders needs more time to work through the options. My own sense is that nothing will come of it, but there’s enough potential there that some people have been thinking along these lines. And then, the bigger question is whether the non-free, softcore men’s entertainment market is doomed going ahead, in face of plenty of other options.

When asked, Playboy PR’s official comment: no comment.

Dennis doesn’t mention circulation or advertising decline in its statement, but says it is “bolstering the online editorial team” in response to “consumer demand for Maxim content online.” The magazine’s 12 employees are in consultation, though there has been no mention of redundancies so far. The company also shut its Computer Buyer magazine in January and merged it with sister title Computer Shopper. Full story on paidContentUK…

– Online future: Could Dennis make a success of Maxim online? It has more of a chance than most consumer publishers, having pioneered the lad’s mag e-zine Monkey, which attracted one million unique users in September according to ABCe. The company’s founder Felix Dennis is famously bullish about the future of print, but he also expects his company to make 40 percent of its entire revenues from online this year and clearly doesn’t see online publishing as as additional nice-to-have section of the business. Dennis claims Maxim.co.uk has 500,000 unique monthly users, gets 8.2 million page impressions a month and had 260,000 subscribers to its weekly newsletter. More after the jump…

– Site or online mag?: What remains to be seen is whether Maxim.co.uk will remain its current stand-alone offering of cars, girls, viral videos and so on, or whether some of the magazine’s usual painstakingly constructed magazine pages will find their way into a digital edition, using the same page-turning technology as Monkey. What is clear is that the Maxim has just lost its primary revenue source and Dennis will have to seriously step up the commercial activities or think creatively to sustain the level of staffing needed to produce a monthly mag.

– Mens’ mags collapse: It’s grim out there for mens’ mags: Maxim slid 41.4 percent in H208 to a monthly average of 45,951 copies, according to ABC, a slim market share compared to rivals such as FHM with 272,545. When Maxim launched in the heady days of 1995, it was before weekly lads’ mags Zoo and Nuts, which between them sell an average of 380,000 copies a week, and free mags Shortlist and Sport which distribute 800,000 each week. So there’s only so much ad revenue and circulation headroom to go round and for Maxim it simply wasn’t enough.

Things have been bad at Alpha, and it has been forced to violate debt covenants, the story said. The largest lender to Alpha is PE firm Cerberus Capital Management, and is central to the restructuring talks, which could fall apart. Quadrangle bought Maxim and Blender from its parent Dennis Publishing USA last year, for about $250 million. Since then, its EBITDA has taken a nosedive, from about $28 million then to about $8 million that it is expected to generate this year. Kent Brownridge, who was brought in as the CEO when Alpha got acquired, left earlier in August. The digital head Doug Warshaw, who joined in fall last year, left after a few months as well.

Earlier this year, Quadrangle attempted to acquire market researcher Greenfield Online, but *Microsoft* ultimately won. Last year, Quadrangle brought on former *Yahoo* COO Dan Rosensweig to start its Silicon Valley office, and among other things he tried to take a stake CNET before it was bought by *CBS*. Keeping in mind Quadrangle’s troubles, how long before Rosensweig leaves? His name has been brought up in connection with the hunt for a new CEO of *Yahoo*, but if that doesn’t happen, well….

You can watch the 8-minute video below (RSS readers may have to click through):

– CNET Networks: It has announce another senior sales executive: Dave Morris, a former Time Inc. executive, is joining the company as SVP of Network Sales, responsible for overseeing CNET Networks’ (NSDQ: CNET) corporate sales accounts. Most recently Morris was president and publisher of Entertainment Weekly and EW.com. Earlier last month the company announced that Stephen Colvin, former president and CEO of Dennis Publishing, publisher of Maxim, Stuff and Blender magazines, joined the company as EVP, heading its entertainment and lifestyle properties.