Magazine Website Traffic Grows 12% in Q1

Consumer magazine websites averaged 70.7 million unique monthly visitors during the first quarter of 2008 - that’s 11.9 percent more than the 63.2 million unique visitors in first quarter of 2007 - according to the Magazine Publishers of America (MPA), writes MarketingCharts.

That gain is more than three times the growth rate of the overall U.S. internet audience, which increased 3.7 percent in the first quarter, according to the data.

The reported information is based on an MPA analysis of Nielsen Online-supplied data from 337 consumer magazine brands online.

Also according to the MPA analysis:

• The average first quarter monthly reach for magazine websites grew to 43.4 percent of the total U.S. internet population, up from 40.2 percent in 2007.
• Magazine website users accounted for an average of more than 497.3 million total sessions per month during the first quarter, a 16.3 percent improvement over the same period last year, when a monthly average of 427.7 million total sessions were recorded.
• Visitors to magazine websites spent an average of 2.3 billion minutes per month during the first quarter - a 16.7 percent increase versus the same period in 2007.

Magazine Digital Initiatives

Some 65 Magazine Digital Initiatives were announced during the first quarter of 2008 - an increase of 14 percent over the same period in 2007.

MPA tracks digital initiatives announced by member publishers in the Magazine Digital Initiatives database, which is updated weekly and features detailed information with links to press releases and articles where available.

Among the new Q1 initiatives were more video for websites, more video for mobile devices, content-sharing partnerships, integrated marketing initiatives, innovations in user-generated content, video, online social networks, community building tools, more blogs, podcasts, widgets and cell phone applications.

About the data: For the online traffic data, websites were included if they met one of the following criteria: the website is branded with the name of a printed consumer magazine or a former hardcopy consumer magazine that now publishes only online; it is a website that represents an aggregated group of magazines, which draw from or extend the brand of the individual magazines, and/or offers readily identifiable magazine content (e.g. Epicurious.com, CNNmoney.com).