NRS PADD magazines: Just two titles dominated by print readership

The latest NRS audience measurement figures for the magazine market have been released today, blending NRS and AMP print readership data for the first time.

The data for the first quarter of 2017 covers the period from April 2016 to March 2017, and is based on 75% NRS print data and 25% AMP print data.

AMP – Audience Measurement for Publishers – is the new currency for published media in the UK. Set to launch early next year, AMP produces de-duplicated brand reach data across mobile, tablet, PC and print.

The new findings, released by PAMCo, the body that oversees the data, show that just two magazines have a significantly heavier print readership than mobile: Hello and Men’s Health.

Of Hello’s 4.2 million-strong audience, 2.5 million of those come from print, while mobile accounts for 1.6 million and PC just 344,000.

Similarly, 975,000 people read Men’s Health in print compared to 370,000 on mobile.

While Empire’s audience is also dominated by print, the gap between print and mobile is less obvious – 636,000 and 455,000, respectively.

Mobile makes up the majority of readership for five titles – including BBC Good Food, which is the best-performing magazine of the titles surveyed with a combined print and digital audience of more than 7.5 million.

Of those, mobile accounts for 5.1 million, while print makes up a little less than 1.3 million. BBC Good Food is also one of only two titles to have a bigger PC audience than print, with 2 million people accessing the website via their PC.

The other title with a strong digital audience is Time Out, with mobile accounting for 2.8 million, PC for 1.1 million and print 1.1 million.

Again, mobile accounts for 2.1 million of NME’s 3 million-strong audience, while 1.2 million of What Car?’s audience of 2.2 million come from mobile.

Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Marie Claire and Radio Times all have a fairly even split across print and mobile.

“The first of our blended NRS data sets shows the almost ubiquitous coverage of published media, with mobile almost equalling print in terms of monthly reach,” said Simon Redican, chief executive of PAMCo.

“Whilst 2017 will be a period of transition between NRS and AMP data sets, the robust data produced will enable the market to continue to plan and trade with confidence.”

Due to the different methodologies, the PAMCo board has mandated that NRS and AMP data should not be compared for commercial or marketing purposes. This means that from Q1 2017 data release onwards, the data should not be compared with previous periods of NRS data. Also, individual periods should not be broken out to compare NRS and AMP data for commercial or marketing purposes, and Newsline has not made any comparisons with any previous results in this article.

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