Add this to the woes facing the magazine industry: retailers are cutting back on the space they allocate to print products, and many are outright banning titles that show a little skin. Over the last three years, 18,000 North American retailers stopped carrying magazines, an 11.3% decline.

AdAge reports that single-copy magazine sales, which act as teasers to attract new subscribers, have been on a steady decline falling 5.6% in just the first half of 2010. And MagNet, a firm that tracks magazine sales, reports that the combination of the decline in stores that are willing to carry “men’s sophisticate” titles has hurt the rest of the industry, as wholesalers have fewer incentives to sell less profitable mainstream magazines.

“A lot of convenience stores no longer sell the ‘men’s sophisticates,'” said [Gil Brechtel, president-CEO of MagNet.]. “It’s really when they were popular or when they were selling men’s sophisticates, their volume was enough that wholesalers could go to them and make a profit. When you eliminate men’s sophisticates, probably 70% to 80% of their volume was removed and made everything less profitable for wholesalers.”

MagNet also reports that WalMart has been giving magazines less space and has been moving them to the back of the store. And Brechtel doesn’t see much reason for optimism: “When the economy improves we will see a steadying of single-copy sales,” he told AdAge. “I would think that there will probably be a continual decline, but perhaps not as quick as previously.”

Magazine Retailers Continue to Dwindle [AdAge]

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