People Scores With Jolie-Pitt Wedding Issue

JOLIE-PITT AND PEOPLE’S BIG DAY: People magazine scored a win at the newsstand — something that’s hard to do these days — with its Angelina Jolie-Brad Pitt wedding issue. The issue, which ran during the week of Sept. 15, is a top 20 percent issue for 2014, according to MagNet Data, a firm that uses data from magazine wholesalers that cover 98 percent of single-copy sales in the U.S.

“Overall, the issue outperformed its prior-year release by more than 20 percent, as well as its average sale over the past year by that same amount,” said MagNet senior vice president Joshua Gary.

This story first appeared in the September 22, 2014 issue of WWD.  Subscribe Today.

That outperformance might not have been too hard, as the cover model a year ago was Katie Couric.

Although Gary would not provide concrete sales numbers, he did say that the Pitt-Jolie wedding issue is currently indexing 20 percent better than People’s first-half single-copy sales average for 2014. According to the Alliance for Audited Media, People’s average newsstand sales for that period totaled 706,344.

But the Jolie-Pitts — Brad, Angie and their gaggle of children — did not outsell People’s recent covers with Robin Williams and Philip Seymour Hoffman — both tributes — or “a few others,” Gary said, without providing further detail.