Teen People Magazine ad pages slipped 4.6% in 2005, followed by a 14.4% slide in the first half of 2006.

According to BusinessWeek, AdAge, Alloy Media & Marketing, the Publishers Information Bureau and TNS Media Intelligence, that money isn’t going to a competing magazine – it’s going to a competing platform.

2005 ad revenues at TeenPeople.com sextupled over 2004. It is any wonder that Teen People (like Elle Girl a few weeks earlier) abandoned the magazine business to concentrate on their web presence?

The phenomenon is rippling . . .

• Video-game advertisers, traditionally a male-oriented lot, cut magazine spending from $46.1 million in 2002 to $28.8 million in 2005, while bumping web spending from $4.6 million to $12.6 million in the same period.
• Movie studios increased spending at Alloy Media & Marketing’s web outposts by 300% in three years.
• Industry folk were taken by surprise when Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. announced it would close the book on Elle Girl while circulation and ad numbers were still rising. The move was preemptive: "The trend lines showed we weren’t going to see the light at the end of the tunnel in the time frame we needed," Hachette’s Jack Kliger told BusinessWeek.

All that said . . . There is a difference between a trend and a done deal.

AdAge cites a ComScore Media Metrix finding that traffic is currently down at branded teen magazine sites:

Seventeen.com dropped 26% year-to-year, from 807,000 unique visitors in May 2005 to 596,000 in May 2006.

ElleGirl.com was down 40%, from 208,000 in May 2005 to 124,000 in May 2006.

TeenPeople.com slipped 36% from 595,000 visitors in May 2005 to 383,000 in May 2006.

Q: So where are readers going if not from print to website?

A: They’re going from being readers to participants.

"MySpace represents a cultural shift in the way girls are communicating with each other," Atoosa Rubenstein, editor of teen juggernaut Seventeen Magazine, told Advertising Age just before securing a partnership with the 85 million-subscriber online behemoth. "It’s an important part of their lives so it has to be important to us."

I think Lady Clairol may be to blame.

In his landmark New York Magazine article, The ‘Me’ Decade, Tom Wolfe recalled the 1961 Clairol ad in which a woman said, “If I’ve only one life to live, let me live it as a blond.” There, in one line, Wolfe said, was the spirit of the age – our cultural zeitgeist. If I have only one life to live, let me live it . . . however I want, wherever I want, doing whatever I want, with whomever I want. Baby Boomers have pursued that ethos unapologetically for 45 years and more (because Clairol’s Agency didn’t invent that way of seeing, they found it and put it to words).

It turns out the kids learned it from us; only now the technology is there to take it farther, faster and with greater economic impact (turning on or turning off the cash faucet with blinding speed). This summer it appears kids are turning on the faucet for a five year-old clothing company called RVCA (the V is a roman script U; it’s pronounced Rue-cah). Look for RVCA on the body of a kid near you this fall (but don’t count on it being there a year from now).

This is why it’s hard to make money on print publications for adolescents – even if everything goes beautifully, publishers still have to pay for a completely new audience every 24 - 48 months as their customers age-out. This is also why high school graduation gift books are so lame – they’re designed to appeal to the aunts, uncles and grandparents who buy them – they might as well be blank inside.

What we can take to the bank is that content, design and participation are more important to the emerging generation of consumers than the media that deliver the goods. They will pay rock and roll money for consumables (where was the multibillion dollar ringtone business two years ago?) – exactly like their parents. If there’s an opportunity here, it’s for those who figure out ways to engage young consumers’ passion for participation. That makes product design an expensive arena in which to play (and most of us don’t have enough money or patience to make a go of it). But if you can engage kids with your service or experience they just might drag you into the future with them.