Marketers are buying fewer ad pages in magazines this year amid a lot of economic worries and ever-proliferating alternatives, but magazine readers are not going anywhere. If anything, magazine audiences are getting bigger and often younger too, according to a Mediaedge:cia analysis of last month’s benchmark spring MRI research report.
Yes, magazines’ paid circulations have declined 1.1% since the report a year earlier (excluding titles that can’t be tracked because they stopped publishing or just launched between reports). But magazines’ overall audiences — counting copies that are distributed free or passed among friends — have climbed 4.4% in the past year, providing the second straight gain after a long period of doldrums, the Mediaedge analysis noted. And the data suggest audiences include a population of magazine readers that’s younger than a year ago.
“For every magazine that is aging, there are magazines that are trending younger — and are gaining new readers at the same time,” the Mediaedge analysis found.
Look across a longer period of time, and the trends take on new clarity. Allure magazine’s median reader age has fallen 1.1 years to 29.1 from 30.2 since the spring 2004 MRI report, while the size of its audience grew 67%. Wired saw its median age fall to 34.6 from 37 in the same span as its audience increased 47%.
Some of those effects stem from getting the right titles into the doctor’s offices, salons and cafés where people can sample them, said George Janson, managing partner-director of print at Mediaedge:cia. “Magazines are doing a better job of managing public-place distribution, which helps build audience,” he said.
