Roy Morgan Research yesterday launched its new Cross-Platform Readership results, with the report finding seven magazines reached over a quarter of a million readers online in the 12 months to March 2016.
The Australian Women’s Weekly was found to be the most-read magazine across print and digital combined, with a total cross-platform audience of 2.07 million. This was slightly ahead of Better Homes and Gardens, which is the most-read newsstand print magazine. Better Homes and Gardens has a readership of 2.05 million readers across print and online combined.
“The new audience measurement platform from Roy Morgan means we can give advertisers the clearest view yet of the total audience size for all our titles across magazines and digital combined. As a multi-platform business this data reliably shows the continued strength of our brands in reaching consumers on the channels of their choice,” says Bauer Media interim CEO Andreas Schoo.
Other Bauer titles saw Woman’s Day record a total cross-platform audience of 1.5 million, Cosmopolitan with 503,0000 readers, Gourmet Traveller on 449,000, Australian Geographic on 749,000, and ELLE on 211,000.
While online is clearly beneficial for publishing, nearly all cross-platform magazines are still read by more Australians in their print form rather than digital. Three titles that had a higher online readership than print was Vogue (406,000 digital and 315,000 print readers, with a total audience of 705,000); Gourmet Traveller (238,000 digital, 225,000 print, for 449,000 overall); and The Monthly (161,000 digital and 154,000 print, for 282,000 total).
These numbers follow on from the Audit Bureau of Circulation’s (ABC) latest figures showing print is continuing a steady decline in the quarter. As a whole, the number of print weekly magazines sold has dropped 12.8 per cent from 1.37 million per week in the January to March 2015 quarter to 1.19 million in the same period this year.
Pacific Magazines CEO Peter Zavecz admits to AdNews “it’s a tough market”, but he isn’t worried by the figures as they are only one part of the business’ offerings. “It’s easy to get carried away by the one metric, but the print metric is not necessarily the most meaningful. On its own, [the ABC figures] are outdated. When it’s combined with our other audience metrics such as readership, online audience and [social] followers, it’s a very different number.
