Immediate Media’s Olive magazine has increased from 100 to 148 pages as part of its relaunch to make it “more like a bookazine”.
The magazine’s frequency of publication has also been reduced from 13 to eight times a year, alongside a price increase of £2.74 to £8.99 per print issue.
Lily Barclay, content director of Olive and Good Food, said travel content has been “quadrupled” for the relaunch, with more space also dedicated to wellness as the brand repositions itself as a “premium lifestyle brand” rather than being just focused on food.
“We’re introducing new talent as well,” Barclay added, referencing new contributors Verna Gao, Seb Graus, and John Gregory Smith.
“It’s been about distinguishing Olive from Good Food as well,” Barclay said. “Good Food is the biggest UK market leader in food magazine publishing. And I think Olive has been on a little bit of a journey.”
Immediate Media bought Good Food brand from the BBC in 2018 and has owned Olive since 2011.
Good Food is “beautiful, kind of nostalgic, family focused, cosy, and Olive is very much premium, aspirational… a very different look and feel,” Barclay said. “I don’t think there is anything quite like Olive on the market at the moment, and I think that’s the really exciting thing about this launch. I think it does set us apart from the competition,” she said, adding it’s the “perfect marriage of food and travel and wellbeing”.
According to Ipsos iris, Olive’s UK monthly online reach in September 2025 was 686,048 users, with 2.2 million minutes spent with the brand.
Between January 2024 and December 2024, average magazine circulation per issue was 34,479, of which 19,104 were the digital edition.
‘All you can read’ 43.6% year-on-year increase
Olive’s “all you can read” subscriptions, which includes those that accessed the magazine from services like Apple News+, increased by 43.6% from 2023 to 2024 (12,434 to 17,857), according to ABC.
This circulation is defined as a digital copy that a consumer has “purchased and viewed as part of a multi-publication package”. It means publishers do not receive a full subscription price for these sales but instead get a royalty fee based on a Spotify-style model.
“We’ve had really exciting results on Apple News, and that’s become a pretty major revenue driver for Olive magazine recently,” said Barclay
Olive calculates its engaged minutes on Apple News to be reaching into the “hundreds of thousands” per month, doing “particularly” well with its wellness and travel content.
“Olive has been doing better in some months than Good Food has been. So, it’s been very popular. It’s the newer verticals that have been performing really well on Apple News for Olive.”
Tackle AI with social and Apple News focus
“Traffic [has] been challenging,” Barclay said. “I think it has been across like all brands like Good Food and Olive have both seen year on year, not like huge dips, but because of AI Overviews and general Google algorithm changes, it’s definitely a more challenging market,” Barclay said.
“That’s why we have decided to really focus on the social and the Apple News for Olive, so digital is still super important and always will be, but we’re sort of actively choosing to split our revenue opportunities across more platforms.
“You have to adapt the way that you work, because if you keep on just pumping stuff out into the same funnels you’re going to be on a continuous decline, and that’s what we’re looking to avoid.”
AI is being used at Olive “to kind of cut down on some of the workload of the more boring tasks”, Barclay said, and give the team more time to write first-person narratives, reviews or create video content – focusing on “growing the brand staff’s personalities as well”.
“So having our staff appearing online in social videos, I think what we’ve seen is that people are following brands less and less. They’re following people,” she said. “So it’s been really important that we’re on the forefront of allowing our staff to have a personality and allowing the brands have a bit more of a personality as well.”
The team use AI through a programme called First Drafts, which creates article drafts based on previous work and provided facts.
“So, say we’re trying to fill an SEO gap of 20 courgette recipes, we’re sort of saving about 30% of time by using First Drafts to do the some of the research that our staff members would have been doing previously,” Barclay said.
Including recipes, the Olive publishes 50-60 articles a week. It also has two weekly newsletters with a total of 137,000 subscribers.
The title has seven members of staff (four full-time and three part-time) working across print, digital, and video, supported by freelance contributors.
Barclay said Olive content typically begins as a “social reel or a video”, which is then developed into a “strong, long-form article which will ultimately end up in print”.
Editors then “bring that content to life across multi platforms, but in a way that kind of feels authentic to both digital and print, and I think that is the real success story of Olive,” Barclay said.
Olive relies more heavily on direct-sold brand partnerships than programmatic when it comes to on-site advertising. It also receives revenue from paid links included in gift guides and review pages.
Parent company Immediate Media reported profit up £3m to £36m last year on turnover level at £182m.
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