A guest edit of Country Life by Sir David Beckham in October generated an uplift in ad revenue of 160%, showing there is still scope to maximise print when the content is right.
The Beckham issue marked the 1,000th under editor-in-chief Mark Hedges who took the helm of the lifestyle weekly in 2006.
Country Life, now owned by Future plc and previously under TI Media, Time Inc and IPC Media, was founded in 1897 and covers a range of topics related to the countryside and British cultural life including property, interiors, gardens, dogs, cars, style and travel.
Country Life had an average weekly circulation of 37,106 in 2024 and has seen readership increases for 13 years of the 19 it has been led by Hedges. It peaked during his tenure at 44,292 in 2021 and was on 40,408 in 2006, meaning it has stayed unusually steady over the past 20 years.
The magazine now has more paid subscriptions than it did when Hedges arrived in 2006 (now on 20,347 excluding opens via all-you-can read services like Readly, versus 15,292 then). All-you-can-read opens made up 5,392 of the reported circulation in 2024.
Hedges, who was previously editor-in-chief of 50 specialist magazines for IPC, told Press Gazette he believes Country Life is “in a much better place than when I took over”.
“I won’t do it forever, but whoever comes after me, it will be in a very good place. Country Life will be the last magazine on the last newsstand. It is the great print triumph, and now backed by our incredible figures already digitally.”
Until a year ago, Country Life had a minimal online presence but now owner Future has “invested a lot” in expanding it, Hedges said.
The online team has gone from one to five people (compared to 20 on the magazine) and he said the website had two million page impressions in October.
According to data provider Ipsos iris, Country Life’s website had a UK audience of 708,650 people in September, up 57% month on month and 83% year on year. UK page views were 1.5 million, up 73% and 118% respectively.
About half of the Country Life website is content repurposed from the print magazine and the other half is original content aimed at a slightly younger audience, according to Hedges.
He noted that the magazine has a “very broad bandwidth of ages” to encompass 75-year-old home downsizers and people in their 30s upsizing, while it is read equally by men and women which is “hugely helpful commercially”.
The ongoing print success of the magazine meant there was no rush for Country Life to expand online, Hedges said.
“At a lot of magazines run by many companies, including mine, but including other ones, the people at the top didn’t really understand magazines, and they all jumped [online].
“They caused the malaise of magazines at a faster rate than it needed to have happened, because they all sort of lurched hard to the right to get onto the digital thing and it was not always a great success. And obviously there are some magazines that now are much more digital than they are in print.
“Country Life is the unusual one, but because we were making so much money, I didn’t really have the need to do it. It’s easier to make money in print if you have a very strong brand, than it is, in many cases, digitally.”
Asked his advice for other magazine editors who might be battling declining circulation and controlling owners, Hedges said: “I have a very simple rule, which is what does the reader want? What does the reader think?…
“As long as you get that right most of the time, as long as you don’t produce your own parish magazine just of your own interests – and be prepared to fight with the management for the right for your magazine to be as successful as it can be.”
‘Famous’ Country Life property adverts remain ‘robust’
Each weekly issue of Country Life begins with pages of countryside property adverts, which Hedges said have been the “mainstay of the commercial side” of the magazine for most of its 130-year history.
But they never know how many pages they’ll need until two weeks before each issue “so it requires a flexibility and planning that is unlike any other”. The 5 November issue had 32 pages of adverts – mostly property – before any editorial, with 193 pages in total.
Hedges said the property adverts have remained “robust” and withstood the arrival of online advertising and sites like Rightmove because they are showcasing “unique” houses in the countryside. “They’re not a terraced house in Fulham,” Hedges said, noting that the average selling price of a property advertised in Country Life is £3.5m to £4m.
After his arrival in 2006, Hedges diversified the content mix in Country Life to bring in more advertising outside its standard property and classified listings.
He noted that many of the properties being advertised in the magazine may not have been updated for many years before going on the market, for example because pensioners cannot justify spending a lot of money on a kitchen, meaning that there was an opportunity to go big on interiors.
Hedges said Country Life now matches titles dedicated to interiors in terms of number of editorial pages dedicated to the subject and number of adverts. “Interiors has been the greatest success,” he said. “It’s worth a huge proportion of our total revenue.”
Country Life still makes more money from readers than advertisers
Other areas that have been added since Hedges took over include travel, luxury and London life.
“Country Life is this most brilliant washing line,” he said. “And as long as I look after the readers and keep them interested in the countryside and, frankly, entertain them, you can hang other things off the washing line that have all gone on to make huge amounts of revenue on their own as part of this bigger beast.”
Hedges added: “I think I’m right in saying it’s really been the most successful magazine in Britain for the last 20 years. And we’ve done a lot of different things… but there’s no point adding commercial side of things if the readers don’t want to read it.
“I take a very reader-first mentality. Extraordinarily, Country Life still makes more money from people buying the magazine than all the advertising. So my first thing is ‘what do the readers want or could be interested in?’ And obviously if it generates some commercial revenue, that’s great.”
Many features of Country Life today would still be recognisable to its founder Edward Hudson in 1897, Hedges said.
He cited the picture-led frontispiece page, often dubbed “girls in pearls”, which leads the editorial content after the initial adverts and traditionally marks milestones or achievements of young women.
Hedges described it as “almost inarguably the most famous page within any magazine in Britain. It’s just a status thing that it has.”
Hedges said Country Life in 2025 is “remarkably eclectic” and “can be about horses or Beatrix Potter, or the mansion tax, or the mausoleum at Castle Howard, all in one issue.
“I think that’s why people enjoy it so much, is that actually, if it turns out that you’re not particularly interested in the article that we have just written on Ritz cream crackers, the next page will have something that might interest you on dragonflies or something like that.”
New sections are still being added, with an art and antiques section and a travel one both being launched under newly-hired editors in the past few years.
Country Life editor: Corporate stuff ‘frustrates me’
The change Hedges dislikes the most from his 19 years at Country Life is that there is “a lot more corporate stuff that goes on… and that frustrates me, because it takes up what I consider sometimes is quite wasted time.
“Because I have diversified the magazine into all these different areas… I really need to be Hermione Granger and be able to be in three places at once,” Hedges said, referring to the Harry Potter character’s time-turning device that helped her attend more classes.
However there are ways Hedges has been able to assert his editorship and refuse outside interference. He said Country Life’s owners, particularly IPC and Time Inc, would do frequent reader research asking their opinions on things like “should we have a bit more pink on this page?”
Hedges said: “I think it was incredibly destructive to magazines and editors, and I just frankly wouldn’t have it.”
Instead, he said: “It’s either my idea, or don’t have me.”
Beckham’s issue was only the fifth guest edit during the tenure of Hedges at Country Life so far. The other four were all royals: the King (when he was Prince Charles) twice, Queen Camilla and Anne, Princess Royal.
Hedges said his bosses would likely be “eager for me to do one as soon as possible” due to the commercial uplift they bring but that he would only “do one when there is a person that’s appropriate to do”.
The King, he said, was “completely aligned – I knew it was his favourite magazine anyway. He was interested in gardening. He’s interested in architecture…
“And the great thing was he liked doing it so much he said ‘could I do it again?’ Which is quite extraordinary, but it’s all part of Country Life’s level of trust it has. Very senior royals have never done anything like that before.”
Hedges was introduced to Beckham two years ago and he said the sports star told him Country Life was his favourite magazine. Over lunch, Hedges said, it became “quite clear to me that he really loved it”.
“I just mulled it over for a bit. I thought, do you know what, I had done the royals and that’s been absolutely brilliant. I want another generation of different types of people to also find out about the countryside and everything it has to offer and what could be better than probably one of the most recognisable British global icons to do it – because we have quite important sales in the US and other countries and he’s hugely recognisable.”
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