Glamour peaked at 620,391 — Condé Nast ended the monthly after a £1 price war

Condé Nast launched Glamour in the UK in 2001 with a format innovation — the handbag-sized magazine — and it debuted with an ABC of 451,486, peaking at 620,391 in 2004. Sixteen years on it was still the tenth biggest-selling magazine in Britain. Then the price war started: in the second half of 2015, Hearst's Cosmopolitan cut its cover price from £3.80 to £1 and boosted free copies, growing from 260,000 to over 400,000 a month while Glamour's sales slid.

At £2 a copy, Glamour could not compete on the newsstand. Sales fell 26 per cent year on year at the end of 2016 to 260,422 copies a month. Condé Nast cut its own price to £1 in early 2017 and got a small bump — up 15,000 copies — nowhere near the boost it had hoped for. With print advertising under pressure everywhere, the loss of more than £2.5m a year in circulation revenue was too much for the title to bear.

On October 6, 2017, Condé Nast Britain announced Glamour would go 'digital-first': the December issue was the last monthly, print became a twice-yearly collectible 'beauty bible', and the editorial and commercial departments were fully integrated, with statutory consultation over job losses. Managing director Albert Read said today's Glamour consumer 'moves to a different rhythm than the one who bought the magazine when it launched in 2001'. Press Gazette called the merger an admission of defeat to Facebook in the battle for display advertising.