July: A great month for business magazines

For those of you who have been paying attention, you’ll remember that Talking Biz News wrote about a month ago about how many of the business magazines — including BusinessWeek, Business 2.0 and Money — had incredibly an incredibly bad June in terms of ad sales, according to data from the Magazine Publishers of America.

Well, July was much better. In fact, most business magazines saw double-digit increases in ad sales, which only Kiplinger’s Personal Finance and Money showing declines for July.

The big winner for the month was Wired, which increased its ad sales nearly 49 percent to $6.1 million for July.

Here are some specifics:

— Business 2.0 reported ad sales of $4.59 million, a 24.6 percent increase from the $3.7 million sold in the same month a year ago.

— BusinessWeek had ad sales of $23.8 million, a 5.6 percent increase from the $22.5 million sold in July 2005.

— The Economist sold $5.9 million worth of ads in July a 16.6 percent increase from the $5.0 million sold in the same time period a year ago.

— Fast Company recorded ad sales of $3.1 million, a 34.9 percent jump from July 2005.

— Forbes sold $24.3 million worth of ads in July, up 28.1 percent from the $19 million sold a year ago. In sheer dollar amounts, Forbes was the leader.

— Fortune sold $22 million, up 16 percent from $18.9 million in July 2005.

— Inc. was up 2.4 percent to $5 million in sales.

Meanwhile, Kiplinger’s slipped 6.2 percent to $2.48 million in ads sold, while Money dropped 19.4 percent to $9.5 million in ads sold. Also in the personal finance category, Smart Money was up 3.0 percent to $3.6 million sold, so it wasn’t an across-the-board decrease for that segment.

The July stats can be found here.

The year-to-date results for business magazines can be found here. Of the magazines listed above, BusinessWeek, Fast Company, Inc., Kiplinger’s and Money are the only ones with a decline in ad revenue through the first seven months of the year.