While some well-established women’s magazines struggle to retain their circulation, the celebrity weeklies, now selling more than 7 million copies a week, are almost as vibrant as Angelina Jolie’s smile. This newly crowded magazine category includes People (the mother of them all), US Weekly, In Touch, Star, Life & Style Weekly, and the British import OK!

These magazines, with cover stories about Jennifer Aniston’s newest romance (“Is Vince the One?” People asked last week), sell most of their copies on the newsstands, which is highly profitable. More traditional women’s magazines often have large circulations through paid subscriptions, sometimes offering their readers copies at less than $1 an issue. Some even sell readers long-term subscriptions at deeply discounted prices, such as three years for the price of one. The rationale is to maintain a large rate base of subscribers for advertisers to reach. Even so, Woman’s Day, for example, just announced a 5% cut in its rate base, to 3.8 million, following a cut in circulation last year as well. The teenage magazines in more traditional formats are suffering, too.Time Inc. announced yesterday that it will fold the print edition of Teen People. Three months ago ElleGirl closed its print edition and is now web-only.

But it isn’t only the strength of newsstand sales that makes celebrity weeklies successful. At a time when most women’s magazines are competing fiercely for advertising dollars, the celebrity weeklies appeal to teenagers and young women in their 20s, an audience that many advertisers hanker after. This is the large group of potential readers that pollsters and demographers call “the millennials.”

“Nobody quite agrees exactly who the millennials are,” an executive vice president at the polling company DYG Inc., Charles Kennedy, said. “Most of us say that they were born between 1976 to the early ’90’s. The oldest are 30 and the youngest can be as young as 14.” This group, which has grown up with the Internet, is more than 70 million strong and is now as large as the baby boomer generation. Many major magazine publishers, whose readership is mainly made up of fast-aging baby boomers, are eager to attract this group but find it hard to reach.

The only magazines that, so far, can attract them in increasing numbers are the celebrity weeklies. During the past six months, In Touch Weekly climbed 33.5% in ad pages, and Life & Style Weekly rose 21.7%. Both of these magazines, published by Bauer, are lower-priced and more tabloid-like than the other celeb weeklies. But advertisers nowadays seem to care less than they used to about the environment in which they place their ads and are choosing instead to follow these younger readers.

Bonnie Fuller, the much writtenabout women’s magazine editor, devised this editorial formula, which has proved successful with the millennials about four years ago when she was reinventing US magazine. Ms. Fuller had previously edited Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, and Glamour. US, owned by Jann Wenner, was a personality-free biweekly that had limped along for years as an also-ran to People. Ms. Fuller recognized that there were many young women who were very interested — “practically obsessed,” she said — with celebrities and all aspects of their lives. Along with Janice Min, now editor in chief of US, she created a highly visual magazine full of paparazzi photos and pages of gossip about young stars such as Britney Spears and Jennifer Lopez. Each issue was filled with their romantic antics, their nonstop diets, and endless photos that showed their outfits in detail. But unlike fan magazines of the past, US and all those that have copied its format take a somewhat mocking tone toward these young stars, showing them in everyday activities like taking out the garbage and joking about some of their more outlandish outfits or criticizing their actions — such as when Ms. Spears drove her car with her baby on her lap rather than in a safety seat. Ms. Fuller is now editorial director of American Media, Inc., which publishes the celebrity weekly, Star.

“Young women talk about celebrities like they are members of their family,” said a professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi, Samir Husni, who is known as “Mr. Magazine” because of his extensive knowledge of the industry. “There is nothing iconic about celebrities anymore. They went from the big screen to television, and now we hold them on our laps in a magazine. Young women can laugh about them. They even feel they can bully them.”

Unlike most magazines for women, young or old, celebrity weeklies do not offer advice or service information. Glamour, by contrast, has a feature called “How To Do Anything Better,” and Cosmo is full of sex tips. “Frankly, young women today don’t want that much advice,” Mr. Kennedy said. “They can find it if they need it, in lots of different places.”

Ms. Fuller said, “When I was working on Star I wanted the magazine to be a relief read, not an educational read. Young women have a lot of pressure, but they are also very self-confident. I wanted the magazine to be pure fun for them.”

Mr. Kennedy noted, “They are not very impressed by the famous. A lot of them even think they could be famous themselves.”

Ms. Fuller said, “Nowadays there is a fine line between real life and being the star of a reality show. There are more and more of these shows — even on the Internet. Some of these young women really could be famous.”

Mr. Kennedy also said this generation has a split-second attention span, so the fact that celebrities’ lives are always in flux keeps them interested. A recent issue of In Touch compared the serial dating habits of a pack of young celebrities including Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. Celebrities in their 20s and early 30s who are marrying and having babies appeals to young women who may be going through similar experiences. Recent People cover stories include a report on Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban’s wedding and the first photos of Ms. Jolie and Brad Pitt’s infant daughter, Shiloh. People reportedly paid more than $4 million for the “Brangelina” photo and increased its newsstand circulation by 800,000 copies. The most desired picture of the moment is probably of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s baby, Suri, who has been kept away from the cameras. US magazine is doing a countdown on its Web site for the first “Suri sighting.”

Will the circulation of these magazines keep climbing? Probably not as rapidly now as in the past. Circulation figures for the first six months of 2006 will be out soon, but unofficial reports say that while In Touch is up and US may be only slightly off, some of the other magazines’ newsstand circulation is softening.

“All magazine categories hit ceilings,” the editor of an industry newsletter about single copy sales, John Harrington, said. “What is remarkable is how People has remained strong.”

People was originally a less visual, more text-heavy baby boomer magazine, but has managed to do what most magazines have not: attract this new, important younger readership. Mr. Harrington said, “It recognized the competition and it responded well.”