Magazine Eyeballs Outpace the Web

Even as ad pages decline and layoffs continue in the magazine industry, the digital side of the print brand equation continues to show strength. The Magazine Publishers Association announced yesterday that traffic to magazine branded Web sites climbed another 8.5% in Q2 2008 compared to same period last year.  This rate of growth is double that of the Web in general, the MPA argues, based on Nielsen stats on 314 Web sites. Almost all the metrics showed improvement. The number of sessions per month was up 9.9%. Perhaps most telling is the duration number, which increased 21.5%. This larger than average spike may reflect the increase in both video and game cotnent at many magazine sites, since those two media formats are proving the stickiest. The average visit is now 4 minues and 25 seconds.

How much numbers like these tell us abotu the health of the magazine industry online specifically is not entirely clear. It does speak to the added effort and richness of branded media sites generally, and we would love to see similar numbers run against other types, like gaming sites or TV and newspaper brands online. We doubt very much that consumers respond specifically to a category of media online so much as the presence of familiar brands. As the eco-system online becomes more diverse and complex, with social networks and media linking driving more traffic, we suspect that familiar brands work at an advantage. When faced with a a line of possible links to stories in a blog or a search result, the tried and true sources will win more often than not. As magazines, like newspapers and TV, learn to weave their way into the eco-system through smarter SEM and social media partnerships, we fully expect all branded sources of information to outpace the Web in growth.