The Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) has released its semiannual FAS-FAX report on U.S. consumer magazines, covering July to December 2011.
The champion among subscriptions: AARP [American Association of Retired People], The Magazine, with 22.4 million subscribers, closely followed by AARP: The Bulletin, with 22.2 million. But, these publications are benefits of AARP membership, with its 50+ demographic. Only two other titles in the list are membership-based, being AAA Living and American Legion Magazine.
Excluding those, Better Homes and Gardens tops the list, with 22.2 million subscribers—down just a hair from 2010. BHG (a Meredith title) claims a monthly readership of 38.33 million readers, 30.28 million of whom are women.
There is likely very little crossover in demographics between BHG and #4 on the list—Game Informer, covering the interactive gaming market. Publisher Sunrise Publications offers no insight into its demographics (which presumably reflects those of gamers, being largely male and under 30).
10% downtick at newsstands
Still, single-copy sales were down 9.96 percent during the period, which Media Life called the “steepest slide in the last four reporting periods.” Single-copy sales across 408 consumer titles dropped from 32,118,948 in the latter half of 2011 to 28,919,153. They were down 9.15 percent during the first half of 2011, and down down 7.27 percent latter 2010.
Ad pages were down in 2011 as well, and consumers likely cut back on impulse buys, particularly of celebrity titles like OK!. Newsstand sales of OK! Plummeted 27.5 percent. Women’s titles suffered as well, with Oprah Winfrey’s O down 32%.
Still, publishers are pushing valiantly into the digital space—a good move: According researchers GfK MRI, almost three-quarters (71%) of tablet owners say they are interested in reading magazines on their devices. Publishers are not surrendering on the newsstands, either. Yesterday marked the launch of a revamped Ladies’ Home Journal, (12th among paid subscriberships in latter 2011, absent from the top 25 in newsstand sales). In addition to a new look and logo, the new content creation model invites readers for a stipend to submit personal growth stories—ostensibly for a more engaged readership.
Election Year Ad Buys: Who’s Tuning In, and Where?
Media buyers and planners hoping to take advantage of Campaign 2012, take note: cable news leads the pack among sources, with local TV in second place, but on the decline. A surprising second-to-last, the Internet. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press’ 2012 campaign news survey discovered the trends in a January survey of 1,507 adults nationwide.
Pew reports that fewer Americans are closely following the campaign than four years ago, which has caused long-term and sharpening declines in the number of people tuning into local TV and network news.
Cable tops the sources in 2012, at 36%, but is only treading water. That despite the fact that cable nets have hosted most of the Republican debates, which are among a campaign year’s strongest draws. Almost half of Republicans (47%) watched a Republican debate during this campaign, up from 32% during the 2008 campaign.Still, cable news “reaches a substantial number across age and partisan lines,” reports Pew. Republicans tune into Fox News, Democrats into CNN and MSNBC.
Only 20% of Americans “regularly learn something” about the campaign or its candidates from local daily papers, a plummet from 31% in 2008. Local TV is down as well.
It is easy to blame it all on the Internet, but not so fast: the Internet as a source has gained only 1% since the 2008 campaign. The Internet had jumped from 13 to 24%, from campaign 2004 (Bush/Kerry) to campaign 2008 (McCain/Obama). Pew speculates that the Internet is the key source for a younger demographic, who are less likely to be Republican. Just 20% of those younger than 30 followed the campaign closely, down from 31% in 2008.
Advertise to Mobile Gamers With Rewards, Not Banners
Advertisers are finding that banner ads in mobile games are viewed as an annoyance, reports Digiday. Companies like Kiip and Appsavvy, and San Francisco-based Gimmie, have found an alternative: rewarding game players with coupons or points toward a purchase.
Advertisers using Kiip applications offer what Kiip calls “Real Rewards for Virtual Achievements.” A player who, for example, achieves a high score in “Slam Dunk Basketball” may receive congratulations and an offer from such consumer brands as Sephora, Carl’s Jr., Dr. Pepper and 1-800-Flowers.
Thusfar, no market research exists to quantify the benefits to those advertisers, or to the game developers who incorporate Kiip, AppSavvy or Gimmie (now in private beta testing). But Kiip CEO Brian Wong estimates the number of mobile game players in the U.S. is 15 million, and growing; and increasingly female. But in addition to those top brands, in-game reward developers are attracting heavy investment. Kiip was incorporated only in July 2010, and has since received $4.4 million in funding from True Ventures, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, and Crosslink Capital. Appsavvy has received $3.1 million in first round funding, also led by True Ventures, and a private investment by About.com Founder Scott Kurnit.
Advertising to Millennials? Do It Digitally and Keep It Short, Says Study
“The 79 million Millennials in the U.S. have an estimated purchasing power of $170 billion dollars per year," said comScore Vice President Bert Miklosi. "Their comfort-level with the Internet and technology in general makes the digital medium an ideal platform for reaching these individuals.”
The digital market research firm has released its report Next-Generation Strategies for Advertising to Millennials. The report highlights results from the company’s study that identifies unique characteristics of the “Millennial generation” (persons born between 1981 and 2000, thus, 12-31 years of age). comScore examined Millennials’ responses to different types of advertising, including TV and digital, compared to older generations, and how marketers can most effectively target this demographic segment.
The medium is ideal, but the Millenial is generally more difficult to persuade via advertising than their older counterparts. This said Miklosi underscores “the importance of creative and messaging optimization in driving worthwhile returns from an investment in advertising to this segment.” Also true, to quote the report, “It is harder for advertising to achieve breakthrough and catch the attention of Millennials, who are notorious for multitasking and short attention spans.” In fact, their immediate recall is the lowest of any age group—at 43%, 9% lower than that of seniors. Still, their delayed recall was strongest among age groups, at 24%.
Courtesy comScore, Inc.
Other key findings:
- The defining characteristics of Millennials include their comfort-level with new technologies and cultural diversity, as well as being accustomed to on-demand access to entertainment, continual stimulation and extreme multitasking.
- Millennials tend to be less interested and more difficult to connect with, capture attention, impress, convince and entertain. Millennials also appear to be more price-sensitive, perhaps due to lower disposable incomes.
- Digital advertising performs better in relative terms among Millennials than does television advertising.
- Across generations including Millennials, the presence of key creative elements in advertising, coined by comScore as the Validated Drivers, were shown to relate strongly to successful advertising.
- Millennials are highly engaged with the content that they choose to view, within both television and digital environments. Engagement has been shown to amplify the effectiveness of advertising, so when targeting Millennials, it is important to utilize engaging content to help boost returns from investments in advertising.
Mobile Ad Space: Ownership Doubles of Tablets, E-Readers Since December
U.S. marketers raised their mobile ad budgets by 7-8% in Q4 2011, but may wish to boost them further. Mobile ad outlets, e-readers and tablet computers specifically, nearly doubled in market reach, and in just six weeks.The percentage of U.S. adults who own tablet computers jumped from 10% to 19% between mid-December and early January. The percentage of those who own e-book readers jumped the same 10-19%, reports the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.
All told, 29% of Americans own at least one of the two devices; that percentage jumped from 18% in mid December.
Pew calls these findings “striking” after stagnant ownership figures between Summer and Autumn 2011. But as Christmas approached, “Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble’s Nook Tablet were introduced at considerably cheaper prices than other tablets.” Among e-readers, some models of the Kindle and Nook fell below $100.
Who are the owners?
After the holiday rush, a full 36% of tablet owners lived in households earning more than $75,000. Almost a third, 31%, is college educated. The highest percentage of ownerships is among adults 30-49, at 27%, but the 18-29 demographic is not far behind, at 24%.
The e-reader story is a bit different. Women outpaced men as new adopters, and now 21% of women own them, versus 19% of men. The average household income was more evenly spread, owing to the lower total cost of ownership.
Gannett Scales Back Metromix In New York: Shades of AOL Patch
Gannett is paring back its online offering New York Metromix, perhaps the most significant of its 65 localized Metromix editions. Local business site Capital New York broke the story yesterday, and called it a “shuttering.” But a Gannett spokeswoman told Capital New York that “Some Metromix employees in editorial, advertising sales,administration and …operations” were eliminated, and that New York Metromix was “evaluating its options” for moving forward.
It appears likely that Metromix will return to its earlier model of aggregating content, but a New York Metromix staffer expressed his doubts that “There’s no way they’re keeping it up.”
Gannett Tribune Company formed a joint venture to acquire Metromix in 2007, when it was local only to Chicago but had enjoyed a healthy 10-year run. Users were typically urban and between 21 and 34. Metromix is currently live in 65 cities, including Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Advertisers include local businesses, like Shanghai Restaurant in San Francisco, but heavy-hitters like Chase Sapphire, ZipCar.
No word yet on the fate of the remaining 64 operations. But, going ultra-local appears to be a young and troublesome model. The Metromix trouble comes just a few months after AOL began scaling back its own local-advertising and locally-generated online offering, Patch. Forbes reported in October 2011 that Patch.com was “burning off $40 million per quarter,” after AOL acquired the outlet in 2009. Patch’s more than 800 editors were advised that their budgets for freelancers would be slashed, articles would be republished across the country (despite the ultra-local focus), and editors were encouraged to dedicate their time to pulling in ad revenue.
Hit Music Central Slates Live-Performance TV Show for April
NBC Nonstop, the digital cable channel serving major markets, will debut Hit Music Central USA (HMC) in April. This one-hour music series will include live performances by musicians in all genres. As All Access Music Group describes it, HMC will be a broadcast and “social TV” experience, with the audience engaging online and through mobile devices. HMC will push its conent out to fans through hitmusiccentral.com, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.
Producer NFocus Entertainment has released a 10-minute “sizzle reel” of the show’s first recording, featuring rock band “Red Jumpsuit Apparatus.” The reel shows a bottom-screen ticker of enthusiastic viewer comments (“OMG! I SAW THEM PLAY AT WILTERN LAST NIGHT!”) and the show’s mechanism for submitting those comments via text message or the HMC site. The reel went on to a live interview with R&B artist C.J. Hilton, then a performance. Production values are flashy and clean, and the broadcast moves along at a rapid clip. Reflecting its interactive content, 20-something co-hosts actor Bryton James and fashion model Patricia Kara enthuse that “Hit Music Central USA is about to…plug you in!”
The show will initially air on NBC Nonstop in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco, among 10 major markets, and NFocus is claiming 20 million potential households.
Food Network Magazine Savors 7th Ratebase Bump
Hearst Magazines announced yesterday that Food Network Magazine will increase its ratebase—its seventh increase since its 2009 launch—by 50,000, and up to 1.45 million. As Folio reports, Hearst’s most recent filing with the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) for the period ending June 30, 2011 tallied the total paid and verified circulation at 1,472,607, and print and digital single copies at about 340,000. This increase took effect with the January/February 2012 issue.
Hearst first piloted the magazine in late 2008 with a test circulation of 300,000 issues. In August 2011, the company announced that Food Network would reach 1.4 million for the 2012 January/February issue, but surpassed that figure by 50,000.
The magazine's media kit describes its demographics as 71.9% female, 28.1% male, with a relatively low median age of 41; it has 6.1 million readers aged 18-49, and 4.6 million aged 25-49. Median household income is $66,978, lower than some of its epicurean competitors like Saveur.com and Bon Apetit, but likely due to its younger and roughly 50% single readership. Food Network Magazine’s success underscores a trend for 2011; two of the top five fastest-growing digital properties were epicurean sites, being Saveur.com and BonApetit, also a print journal. All but one of the top five were lifestyle books.
IAB Opposes FTC on Child Privacy
Child privacy protection can go too far, complains the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). It believes a proposal by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that strengthens child privacy regulations “would have substantial negative effects for parents, children and companies alike.” The 10-year-old Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) bans website owners from collecting such “unique identifiers” from children, such as names, addresses and telephone numbers, without parental consent. The proposed changes would broaden the definition of a “unique identifier” to include tracking cookies, device serial numbers, and in some cases, IP addresses, reports MediaDailyNews. This, complains IAB, would render behavioral targeting (e.g., targeted advertising and demographic data) practically impossible.
Google+ Reaches Affluent, and the 18-34 Age Group
In the days following the June 28 launch of Google+ as invites became more available, visits to the site steadily increased, particularly between July 5th and July 12th. To date, Tuesday, July 12th and Thursday, July 14th were the peak days for total visits, according to analysis from Experian Hitwise.
The highest share of visits to Google+ since launch is from those between the ages of 25-34 and those between 18 and 34 were more likely than the overall online population to visit. The audience to Google+ tends to be more affluent, over-indexing for those earning a household income of $60k and over, particularly $150k and up.
For the week ending July 19, 2011, the average visit time for Google+ was five minutes and fifty seconds up from four minutes and fifty two seconds the week prior. While the average visit time has increased since launch, in comparison, users spent an average of 21 minutes and fifty seven seconds on Facebook last week.
The combination of Google and Gmail accounted for over 50% of all upstream traffic to Google+ last week, with additional referrals from other Google properties like YouTube and Google Profiles. Facebook ranked 3rd among websites visited immediately before Google+, not surprising since many social network users tend to maintain multiple accounts, especially to experiment with new social networks.