Internet schminternet. The latest magazine readership data from Toronto’s Print Measurement Bureau (PMB) paints a stable picture for print in Canada.
Average readership across the 110 publications measured in the Fall 2010 study was 1.02 million readers, virtually unchanged from 1.04 million readers in the Spring study.
The average number of readers-per-copy was also virtually unchanged at 4.9, compared with 5.0 in the Spring study. Canadians currently spend an average of 40.6 minutes reading a magazine, a slight decline from 41.3 minutes in the Spring study, but comparable to the 40.4 minutes recorded in the 2005 PMB study.
Finally, Canadians’ current interest in magazines rates a 6.8 on a scale of 1-10, identical to the Spring study and up from 6.7 in both the 2005 and 2007 studies.
The latest results are based on personal interviews with 24,000 Canadians age 12+, with the final interviews taking place in mid-2010.
“There are huge changes happening on the media scene, but the PMB study measures readership of print vehicles, and there’s no escaping the fact there is relative stability there,” said PMB president Steve Ferley. “That’s what the data is saying.”
Reader’s Digest remains Canada’s most widely read magazine with 5.9 million readers per issue, down from 6.36 million readers in the Spring 2010 study and 6.42 million readers in the Fall 2009 study.
The second most-read magazine, Transcontinental Media‘s flagship title Canadian Living, saw its readership remain essentially flat at 3.97 million (it was 3.98 million in the Spring study).
It was followed by Kraft Canada‘s custom magazine What’s Cooking with 3.52 million readers, People with 3.48 million readers (and an industry-leading 20.6 readers per copy) and Rogers Consumer Publishing‘s Chatelaine with 3.42 million readers (down from 3.56 million readers in the Spring study).
Kraft’s Qu’est-ce qui mijote, meanwhile, is the most read French-language title with 1.29 million readers, followed by Coup de Pouce (1.22 million), Touring (1.10 million) and Châtelaine (1.01 million).
The release also marked the first appearance in the Fall study by Rogers’ celebrity weekly Hello! Canada (729,000 readers) and Moses Znaimer’s Zoomer (481,000).
