Little Overlap Between Print and Online Advertisers in Consumer Magazines

The explosion of digital content consumption in the last decade has created many successful digital-only publications and turned traditional magazines into multi-platform media brands. Perhaps surprisingly, there is still little advertiser overlap and integrated ad sales between these brands’ print and online platform. While there is some overlap, online advertisers and print advertisers are two discrete groups of advertisers.

Looking across 177 national consumer magazine brands, just 2,760 (31%) of the 8,825 total print advertisers also advertised online in the group of titles during third quarter 2014. This figure has remained relatively consistent over the past year, with 31% of print advertisers placing ads online in Q3 2013, and moving down to 28% and 29% to in Q1 2014 and Q2 2014, respectively.

There is variation in the percentage of print advertisers also advertising online during Q3 2014 when looking across advertising categories.  Only 20% of print advertisers in the Professional Service category advertised online, while 48% of print advertisers in the Automotive category advertised online.

In nearly all categories, there were more online advertisers than print advertisers during Q3 2014. The Toiletries & Cosmetics category, however, is one of the few with more print advertisers, 31% of which also advertised online in Q3 2014. Perhaps boosted by women’s fashion magazines’ benchmark September issues, the Apparel & Accessories category also featured more print advertisers, with 27% of them also advertising online during Q3 2014.