George Pimentel/WireimageYou can't deny that Justin Bieber is a global phenom.
He's got three über-successful albums, sold-out tours, a hit 3-D movie and a hottie new GF that he's mucho in love with (we hear). Justin's even got a disease named in his honor—and plenty of peeps are happy to suffer from Bieber Fever.
Seriously, what can the Biebster not do?
Sell magazines, apparently. You'd think that all those screaming fans would have any magazine flaunting his adorable mug flying off the stands like hotcakes. But that's so not the case. And we hate to break it to you, Beliebers, but it appears your pint-sized idol has found his Achilles heel:
It's time to face the music: Justin's baby face and trademark ‘do don't lead to epic magazine sales. In fact, sales are bad...like, really bad.
A kiss-adorned Biebs graced the February issue of glossy rag Vanity Fair and the headline boasted, "Is this the adorable, inescapable face of 2011?" Well, as adorable and inescapable as the Biebster may be, the public's wallets did not agree.
With only 246,000 copies of his glossy puss sold, J.B.'s Vanity Fair cover is about to be crowned the worst-selling issue the swanky mag has had in the past 12 years. Ouch! The previous holder of this not-so-prestigious title was Will Smith way back in 1999.
Guess Justin is exactly "like a little Will Smith." In all the wrong ways, that is.
But is this Vanity Fair snafu all just a poor editorial decision?
Let's be honest, V.F.'s target audience isn't exactly 12-year-old tweeny boppers who spend all day tweeting the boy of their dreams (while also sending a few nasty @replies to GF Selena Gomez). So this had to just be a fluke, right? There's no way Mr. Never Say Never is an editorial dud?
We'd love to say, "Don't stop Beliebing," but the bad new keeps rolling in.
Bieber was featured on the cover of recent issues of Teen Vogue and People, too, both of which have demos that are arguably more in his wheelhouse. And both mags delivered numbers that were sub-par compared to average sales.
So, why does the Biebster‘s boyish appeal not translate to paper?
Now, when we questioned Mr. Bieber's crew about his lack of newsstand success and what this could possibly mean, we were only met with stony silence.
Or is the answer just too obvious—that Vanity Fair writes articles longer than 140 characters?