The Outlook Group has pulled the plug on three of its
licensed international titles: People, Geo and Marie Claire, choosing not to
renew licenses that were up, BestMediaInfo reported on Friday. Marie Claire was
being published in partnership with French publisher Groupe Marie Claire,
People magazine was licensed from Time Inc., while Geo was licensed from Gruner
+ Jahr (G+J) International, a part of the Bertelsmann group. It’s worth noting
that, two years ago, G+J had acquired a majority stake in custom publisher
Maxposure, so it does have a magazine presence in India to relaunch Geo with. There appear to be contradictory statements on the reasons
for the closure of these magazines. Indranil Roy, President for the Outlook
Group told BestMediaInfo that “It has nothing to do with profitability. It’s
our business call not to continue with the titles”, while Vinod Mehta,
Editorial chairman of the group, told BusinessWorld that the three magazines
were losing money because of the huge licensing fees for these three “white
elephants” being paid to the foreign title holders.
