Over the past few years when talking about how the Internet is siphoning readers and viewers away from traditional media, the focus has been on newspapers because they have been hit the hardest by the rise of the web. However, the paper's print media cousin - magazines - have also had a hard time holding on to their audiences as is illustrated in a Media Daily News column that Erik Sass posted Monday on Mediapost.com. 

Erik's article broke out some key results from a  Mediamark Research and Intelligence report that showed many individual magazine titles losing hundreds of thousands of readers each over the past year. The cumulative loss across all titles was 22 million! Certain categories were hit harder than others with magazines about cars and celebrities being among the biggest losers. Both topics are covered extensively online of course, especially celebrities whose lives are chronicled in the most minute detail (and often in real time) on one website or another, leaving most magazine coverage a day late and a dollar shot.

In the automotive field, Automobile magazine readership plunged 21% (from 4.6 million readers in the spring of 2010 to 3.63 million this spring). A car magazine I subscribe to, Motor Trend, also got whacked, falling 12% (from a little over 8 million to just over 7 million). 

Weekly news magazines, as you might expect with so much news content on the web, also took a seriousbeat down. Newsweek, which seems to change owners every other week, slid 12.8% (from 15.25 million to 13.29 million). Time (another title I subscribe to) fared better but still lost 4.1% of its readers (down from 19.74 mllion to 18.93 million). 

While the carnage was widespread, some titles still managed to gain ground despite the ever growing strength of the web. One of the biggest gainers was Entrepreneur magazine which shot up 34% (from 2.5 million readers to 3.36 million). That one doesn't surprise me a lot as the brutal recession we have been going through has forced many furloughed workers who couldn't find new jobs to go into business for themselves. 

I'm sure a lot of domainers aren't cheering Entrepreneur magazine's success though. The publication became something of a poster child for over-reaching trademark interests through their efforts to take domains that had the word "entrepreneur" in the string away from rightful owners of the generic term (in fact an entire website at Entrepreneur.net is devoted to exposing the magazine's bullying tactics.)

Despite there being some magazines that have managed to swim upstream against the  tide, you still have to believe it's just a matter of time before the inexorable growth of the web takes a big chunk out of their hides, just as it has done to so many other traditional media outlets. 

(Posted May 24, 2011)