Digital magazine researchers find a surprising number of respondents read a lot of print titles.
It was designed to quantify digital magazine readership, but the results of the Digital Magazine Publishing Study and Handbook from Mequoda uncovered a surprising thing about print.
“We wanted to first understand what percent of the American adult population with Internet access reads print magazines. We also wanted to learn how many print magazines, on average, they are consuming in a 30-day period,” writes Kim Mateus in Mequoda.
“We learned that 69.6% of adult Americans have read an average of 2.91 print magazine issues in the last 30 days. This means that 147 million adults have read an average of 428 million print magazine issues in the last 30 days.”
While digital marketers are quick to point out that digital magazines are – slowly – gaining revenue share, the report still shows that print magazines are read much more often than digital. While 70% said they read 2-3 print magazines in the previous month, only 37% reported having read even one digital magazine.
“One reason is that it’s really easy to publish your own magazine now,” author and journalist Ruth Jamieson told the Independent.
“If you have the idea then there are loads of free, or relatively cheap, tools to make it with. And then, using social media, you can find contributors and an audience,” Jamieson explains.
“So in a way the very thing that was supposed to destroy magazines – the internet – is actually helping to revive them. You don’t need a big office and lots of money from investors any more.”
For many, like Mateus and the team at Mequoda, this all seems rather shocking. No big surprise here, but sure is nice when we see these kind of numbers.