Now this is how you bust a myth.
“Contrary to the prevailing narrative in some quarters (‘magazines are print, print is dying, therefore so is the magazine industry’), consumer engagement with magazine brands is growing rapidly,” notes Sue Todd in MediaTel.
“People are interacting with magazines on multiple platforms and formats across the whole content ecosystem like never before,” she continues.
Two key points play into her assertions. The first is that magazine media brands are producing content on a variety of platforms, which leads to greater engagement and wider reach than a print magazine alone could have hoped to achieve.
“Depth comes from a brand being relevant and vital to a consumer and offering skillfully crafted, original, and trusted content (whether that is print or otherwise),” Todd notes.
Secondly (and this is true of any industry, not just magazines), the digital disruption has forced many brands to evolve beyond their initial offering. And this has been a good thing for many titles.
“The popular myth around print magazines has been fueled by the fact that overall newsstand sales are declining. While this is true in aggregate, it does not apply to many successful titles,” Todd continues.
And while digital content distribution is helping to open the reach of many print titles to new audiences, print maintains an allure of its own that is driving non-print brands to expand into the medium.
“Several consistent themes seem to drive these brands expansions into print: print’s tangibility and durability, its credibility and trust, the sense of community, identity and belonging it can elicit, its ability to filter and distill information in a noisy cluttered content landscape and its high dwell time,” Todd notes.
All of this results in increasing demand for magazine media content, which Todd feels makes the influence of magazine brands higher than ever.