NRS PADD: Magazine readers still prefer print

While mobile continues to play a big part for magazine brands, print was still the most popular way to consume content between October 2015 and September 2016, according to the latest readership figures from PAMco.

Mobile brings in more readers than print for five of the 13 titles surveyed – including BBC Good Food, for which mobile increases print and PC readership by more than 160%, making it the best-performing magazine brand by a long shot with 8.8 million readers.

Similarly, Cosmopolitan benefits greatly from mobile readers, which boost print and PC readership by 115%. The title currently has an audience of 3.5 million, with mobile accounting for a little under 2.3 million of that.

Other titles dominated by mobile readership include the Radio Times, Time Out and NME.

However, print is still the leading medium for the majority of titles – including Heat, which consistently records a strong and loyal print following. Of its 2.2 million readers, more than 1.8 million come from print, while mobile accounts for just 482,000.

Men’s Health, which has an overall readership of almost 1.5 million, is structured similarly, with 1.1 million readers coming from print and 388,000 from mobile; while 2.8 million of Hello’s 4 million readers come from print and 1.2 million from mobile.

OK and What Car? are the only two titles where print and mobile readership are fairly evenly split.