People is an American weekly magazine of celebrity and human-interest stories, published by Meredith Corporation.^[3] With a readership of 46.6 million adults, People has the largest audience of any American magazine.^[4] People had $997 million in advertising revenue in 2011, the highest advertising revenue of any American magazine.^[5] In 2006, it had a circulation of 3.75 million and revenue expected to top $1.5 billion.^[6] It was named "Magazine of the Year" by Advertising Age in October 2005, for excellence in editorial, circulation, and advertising.^[7] People ranked number 6 on Advertising Age's annual "A-list" and number 3 on Adweek's "Brand Blazers" list in October 2006.

The magazine runs a roughly 50/50 mix of celebrity and human-interest articles. ^[a›] People's editors claim to refrain from printing pure celebrity gossip, enough to lead celebrity publicists to propose exclusives to the magazine, and evidence of what one staffer calls a "publicist-friendly strategy".^[6]

People's website, People.com, focuses on celebrity news and human interest stories.^[7] In February 2015, the website broke a new record: 72 million unique visitors.^[8][9]

People is perhaps best known for its yearly special issues naming the "World's Most Beautiful", "Best & Worst Dressed", and "Sexiest Man Alive". The magazine's headquarters are in New York, and it maintains editorial bureaus in Los Angeles and in London. For economic reasons, it closed bureaus in Austin, Miami, and Chicago in 2006.^[6][7]

The concept for People has been attributed to Andrew Heiskell, Time Inc.'s chief executive officer at the time and the former publisher of the weekly Life magazine. The founding managing editor of People was Richard B. (Dick) Stolley, a former assistant managing editor at Life and the journalist who acquired the Zapruder tapes of the John F. Kennedy assassination for Time Inc. in 1963. People's first publisher was Richard J. (Dick) Durrell, another Time Inc. veteran.

Stolley characterized the magazine as "getting back to the people who are causing the news and who are caught up in it, or deserve to be in it. Our focus is on people, not issues."^[10] Stolley's almost religious determination to keep the magazine people-focused contributed significantly to its rapid early success. It is said that although Time Inc. pumped an estimated $40 million into the venture, the magazine only broke even 18 months after its debut in March 1974. Initially, the magazine was sold primarily on newsstands and in supermarkets. To get the magazine out each week, founding staff members regularly slept on the floor of their offices two or three nights each week and severely limited all non-essential outside engagements. The premier edition for the week ending March 4, 1974 featured actress Mia Farrow, then starring in the film The Great Gatsby, on the cover. That issue also featured stories on Gloria Vanderbilt, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the wives of U.S. Vietnam veterans who were Missing In Action.^[6] The magazine was, apart from its cover, printed in black-and-white. The initial cover price was 35 cents (equivalent to $1.78 in 2018).

The core of the small founding editorial team included other editors, writers, photographers and photo editors from Life magazine, which had ceased publication just 13 months earlier. This group included managing editor Stolley, senior editors Hal Wingo (father of ESPN anchor Trey Wingo), Sam Angeloff (the founding managing editor of Us magazine) and Robert Emmett Ginna (later a producer of films); writers James Watters (a theater reviewer) and Ronald B. Scott (later a biographer of Presidential candidate Mitt Romney); former Time senior editor Richard Burgheim (later the founder of Time's ill-fated cable television magazine View); Chief of Photography, a Life photographer, John Loengard, to be succeeded by John Dominus, a noteworthy Life staff photographer; and design artist Bernard Waber, author and illustrator of the Lyle The Crocodile book series for children. Many of the noteworthy Life photographers contributed to the magazine as well, including legends Alfred Eisenstaedt and Gjon Mili and rising stars Co Rentmeester, David Burnett and Bill Eppridge. Other members of the first editorial staff included editors and writers: Ross Drake, Ralph Novak, Bina Bernard, James Jerome, Sally Moore, Mary Vespa, Lee Wohlfert, Joy Wansley, Curt Davis, Clare Crawford-Mason,^[11] and Jed Horne, later an editor of The Times-Picayune in New Orleans.

In 1996, Time Inc. launched a Spanish-language magazine entitled People en Español. The company has said that the new publication emerged after a 1995 issue of the original magazine was distributed with two distinct covers, one featuring the murdered Tejano singer Selena and the other featuring the hit television series Friends; the Selena cover sold out while the other did not.^[12] Although the original idea was that Spanish-language translations of articles from the English magazine would comprise half the content, People en Español over time came to have entirely original content.

In 2002, People introduced People Stylewatch, a title focusing on celebrity style, fashion, and beauty – a newsstand extension of its Stylewatch column. Due to its success, the frequency of People Stylewatch was increased to 10 times per year in 2007. In spring 2017, People Stylewatch was rebranded as PeopleStyle. In late 2017, it was announced that there would no longer be a print version of PeopleStyle and it would be a digital-only publication.

In Australia, the localized version of People is titled Who because of a pre-existing lad's mag published under the title People. The international edition of People has been published in Greece since 2010.

On July 26, 2013, Outlook Group announced that it was closing down the Indian edition of People, which began publication in 2008.^[13][14]

In September 2016, in collaboration with Entertainment Weekly, People launched the People/Entertainment Weekly Network. The network is "a free, ad-supported online-video network carries short- and long-form programming covering celebrities, pop culture, lifestyle and human-interest stories". It was rebranded as PeopleTV in September 2017.^[15]

In December 2016, LaTavia Roberson engaged in a feud with People after alleging they misquoted and misrepresented her interview online.^[16][17][18]

Meredith purchased Time Inc., including People, in 2017.^[19] In 2019, People editor Jess Cagle announced he was stepping down from his role.^[20] It was later announced he would be replaced by deputy editor Dan Wakeford, who previously worked for In Touch Weekly.^[21]

In 1998, the magazine introduced a version targeted at teens, called Teen People.^[22] However, on July 27, 2006 the company announced that it would shut down publication of Teen People immediately. The last issue to be released was scheduled for September 2006.^[23] In exchange, subscribers to this magazine received Entertainment Weekly for the rest of their subscriptions. There were numerous reasons cited for the publication shutdown, including a downfall in ad pages, competition from both other teen-oriented magazines and the internet, and a decrease in circulation numbers.^[24] Teenpeople.com was merged into People.com in April 2007. People.com will "carry teen-focused stories that are branded as TeenPeople.com," Mark Golin, the editor of People.com explained. On the decision to merge the brands, he stated, "We've got traffic on TeenPeople, People is a larger site, why not combine and have the teen traffic going to one place?"^[25]

In a July 2006 Variety article, Janice Min, Us Weekly editor-in-chief, blamed People for the increase in cost to publishers of celebrity photos:

People reportedly paid $4.1 million for photos of newborn Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt, the child of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.^[6] The photos set a single-day traffic record for their website, attracting 26.5 million page views.^[6]

The annual feature the "Sexiest Man Alive" is billed as a benchmark of male attractiveness and typically includes only famous people and celebrities. It is determined using a procedure similar to the procedure used for Time's Person of the Year. The origin of the title was a discussion on a planned story on Mel Gibson. Someone exclaimed, "Oh my God, he is the sexiest man alive!" And someone else said, "You should use that as a cover line."^[26]

For the first decade or so, the feature appeared at uneven intervals. Originally awarded in the wintertime, it shifted around the calendar, resulting in gaps as short as seven months and as long as a year and a half, with no selection at all during 1994 (21 years later the magazine did select Keanu Reeves to fill the 1994 gap, with runners-up including Hugh Grant and Jim Carrey). Since 1997, the dates have settled between mid-November and early December.

Dates of magazine issues, winners, ages of winners at the time of selection, and pertinent comments are listed below.

As of 2018, John F. Kennedy, Jr. and Patrick Swayze are the only winners to have died. Kennedy, Adam Levine, David Beckham, and Blake Shelton are the only non-actors to have won the award.

In December 2014, People selected its first and only Sexiest Woman Alive.^[43] No later People Sexiest Women of the Year were announced. Cindy Crawford alongside Richard Gere had been declared "Sexiest Couple of the Year" on October 19, 1993 as a departure from the magazine's annual "Sexiest Man of the Year" award.

At the end of each year People magazine famously selects 25 news-making individuals or couples who have received a lot of media attention over the past 12 months and showcases them in a special year-end issue, the '25 Most Intriguing People of the Year'. This series of full-page features and half-page featurettes includes world leaders and political activists, famous actors and entertainers, elite athletes, prominent business people, accomplished scientists and occasionally members of the public whose stories have made an unusual impact in news or tabloid media.^[44]

People's 100 Most Beautiful People is an annual list of 100 people judged to be the most beautiful individuals in the world. Until 2006, it was the 50 Most Beautiful People.

Julia Roberts holds the record for most times named, with five.^[45] Michelle Pfeiffer and Jennifer Aniston have appeared twice.