Print Magazine Readership Off Sharply Among Increasingly-Digital Affluent

Advertising Age - MediaWorks:

BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) -- Magazine readership among the affluent plunged 16% in the past year as the group spent 12% more time using the internet and sharply stepped up purchases of e-readers and tablet computers, according to the annual Ipsos Mendelsohn Affluent Survey. ...

Magazine readership has slipped modestly in some prior years of the annual survey, which this year garnered more than 13,800 responses, but this is the first double-digit decline, said Ipsos Mendelsohn President Bob Shullman.

Mr. Shullman said the year-over-year shift represents something he's seen daily on his commute into Manhattan over the past year: the widespread disappearance of magazines and print material in favor of e-readers and other mobile devices.

"I was talking to the guy who runs the newsstand at my rail station," Mr. Shullman said, "and he said, 'Bob, I'm basically doing half what I was a year ago.'" Mr. Shullman said he believes much of the shift also comes from traditional media stepping up efforts to drive people to their websites. ...

"The consumer is getting more and more comfortable with the alternative platforms," he said, adding that he believes affluents are simply getting their content in a different format, not doing away with it.

The Magazine Publishers of America agrees. "It has become increasingly recognized that traditional ways of audience measurement are not capturing the total magazine readership footprint," the group said in an e-mail statement. "Affluents are among the early adopters of new technologies, and thus it's more likely that they would be first in migrating some of their magazine readership to various new digital platforms."

The Ipsos survey was completed in June, only two months after the launch of Apple's iPad, but it already shows nearly a million of the nation's more than 44 million affluent heads of household owned tablet computers and another 2 million owned e-readers. ...