Five things you need to know from the latest PAMCo release for magazines

The latest cross-platform audience figures for UK magazine brands have been released today, offering insight into how the Covid-19 pandemic and nationwide lockdown has affected magazine readership.

With face-to-face interviewing suspended from March 17, PAMCo has used the same print audience estimates as it did for Q1 (covering April 19 to March 20), fused with the latest Comscore data for June 2020.

Here’s what you need to know:

1. Total brand reach bounced back

Most magazines saw their monthly total brand reach (print and digital combined) bounce back this quarter after taking an initial hit from Covid in Q2, although the majority of titles remain down compared to this time last year.

2. Mobile phones are driving growth

Accessing content via phones is playing a key role in the success of titles that have seen a year-on-year increase in total brand reach.

For example, the monthly figure for Country Life increased by 32.8% – up to just under 1.1 million – helped by a 132.5% increase in numbers accessing via a mobile phone, which now stands at 593,000.

3. Tablets are increasingly popular for women’s magazines

Tablets are more likely to be on the rise for accessing women’s magazine content than general magazine content.

4. Lockdown has reshaped readership patterns, both for those of us who have been doing more…

Lockdown hobbies have been influencing readership, with the likes of Gardeners’ World, Golf Monthly, Runners World and Sporting Gun all growing their monthly reach year-on-year.

Gardeners’ World, for example, was up 95.2% over the year, while Golf Monthly was up 17.8%.

5. …and for those of us who have been watching more

While some of us have been picking up new hobbies, the rest of us have spent lockdown watching more TV. As TV viewing surged over the last few months, titles including TV & Satellite Week, TV Times and What’s On TV also saw their monthly reach rise year-on-year, with TV & Satellite Week up by 15%.

Subscribers can find a full break down of the multi-platform figures for all reporting magazine titles in the tables below, or by logging in to Mediatel Connected.