BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS

Magazine Audience Up 8% Since 2000
Monday, September 28, 2009
Steve Smith

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It only feels like a shrinking market because the monthly issues are so much slimmer. Unlike newspapers, which are losing readership at an alarming pace, the overall audience for magazine has been inching upward in this century, according to analysis from Mediapost’s Eric Sass. His rundown of the top 81 titles as measured by MRI (Mediamark Research and Intelligence) shows a total audience growth of 8% between 2000 and 2009. Newsstand sales drops, which are inevitable in rough economic periods, are often cited as evidence of the magazine platform’s waning appeal in these digital times. But the grand totals for audience reach belie conventional wisdom.

Sass found that not all was rosy, but that spikes and declines varied across and within segments. Women’s general interest magazines increased their audience size 13.2% but that was within a larger general interest segment that saw a falloff of 1.4%.

The survey only included books that had been continuously published through the 2000-2009 period, and among the 24 titles in general interest only 10 suffered audience declines. Reader’s Digest (-28%) and Spin (-32%) were hit hardest. Among the 38 titles in the women’s interest category, audience size increased from 297,606,000 in mid 2000 to 337,337,000 in the middle of this year.

Clearly there is a disconnect between the raw data and advertisers’ unprecedented flight from periodical ad pages. While the overall economy takes much of the blame, the ad spending drop in magazines simply is steeper than the drop in other media during this crisis. Marketers continue to predict that they will take more money from print budgets in the near future and rely on the more measurable digital platforms. It is not a crisis of audience but a crisis of confidence.

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