The Alliance for Audited Media (AAM) announced this week that it is introducing a new category that reflects the growth of unlimited-access digital magazine programs such as the Texture app from Next Issue Media as well as platforms like Zinio and Readly.
The Multi-Title Digital Programs category is designed to reflect increased consumer uptake of the so-called all-you-can-read model, said Joan Brehl, vice-president and general manager at AAM Canada in Toronto.
The AAM’s June 2015 report pegged digital circulation in Canada at about 407,000, representing approximately 5.9% of the country’s total circulation base of 6.9 million. Texture is contributing about 250,000 of total digital circulation (about 3.6% of total Canadian magazine circulation).
On a North American basis, the all-you-can-read model accounts for approximately 1.7% of total circulation, which suggests Canadians have been quicker to adopt it than their U.S. counterparts.
Brehl attributed the growth of Texture’s circulation number to an extensive marketing push by Rogers, which is a partner in Next Issue Media with several major U.S. publishers including Condé Nast Publications, Hearst Corp. and Time Inc. (Rogers also owns Marketing and MarketingMag.ca.)
“Advertising works,” she said.
The Multi-Title Digital Programs category will be included in the June 2016 AAM report covering the first six months of its regular report, which it will issue in the fall. It will allow publishers to report digital subscriptions as paid subscription sales (as opposed to single copy sales), which Brehl said more accurately reflects how consumers interact with the platform.
The report will also include additional engagement-related data, including the average number of total requests by paid subscribers to receive a digital issue, average number of times issues were opened, and unique and total opens.
Brehl said that the AAM’s magazine committee and board have been monitoring the all-you-can-read models for the past three to four years. “The board’s feeling was ‘here’s something that’s really innovative and different from anything we have, let’s watch it and see how it grows,’” said Brehl.
“Now it’s at a position where it’s stabilizing and there are resources to put behind it for analytics.”
The new circulation category is among a series of planned updates to the AAM portfolio, including a new online dashboard called AAM Brand View that will enable publishers to provide cross-media measurement tools and AAM Site Certifier, which verifies premium publishers’ key website metrics from Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics.
The company is also launching a new Ad Block Detection tool that will report consumer adoption of ad blockers across browsers, locations and devices.
