Australians remain loyal readers of printed magazines, according to the latest Roy Morgan Australian Magazine Print Readership for the year to September, which shows audience reach across all print magazines is up by 2.7 per cent.
Food & Entertainment was named the best-performing category overall, with Coles Magazine and Fresh by Woolworths taking out the top two spots with 3.6 million and 3.2 million average issue readership respectively. Both are printed by IPMG, soon to be part of PMP.
Coles Magazine has managed to boost readership by 31 per cent since September 2015 and Fresh readership surged by 25.4 per cent.
Other categories which also experienced a popularity boost include Sports ( up 15.4 per cent), General Interest (up six per cent), Health & Family (up five per cent), Business, Financial & Airline (up 4.7 per cent), Music & Movies (up 3.1 per cent), Women’s Fashion (up 1.2 per cent), TV (up 0.7 per cent) and Home & Garden (up 0.2 per cent).
Within these categories, titles which experienced massive readership surges are motor magazine, Open Road (up 15.5 per cent), National Geographic (up 9.6 per cent), Taste.com.au Magazine (up 36.7 per cent) and Australian Geographic (up 23.7 per cent).
A number of competitors managed to gain ground or claim the lead over their rivals including Cosmopolitan which is up 5.9 per cent, likely due to the closure of direct competitor Cleo in March.
Men’s Fitness (up 21.4 per cent) showed its muscle against Men’s Health (down 7.2 per cent) and Fishing World (up 10.5 per cent) netted Modern Fishing (down 16.8 per cent).
Roy Morgan Research CEO Michele Levine comments, “Readership of print magazines continues to grow, up 2.7 per cent year-on-year, including almost 100,000 compared with previous quarterly results in June.
“The continued success of both Coles Magazine and Fresh highlights the increasing influence of retailers in the media space.”
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