What media's audiences have grown at the highest rate over the past 5 years?

April 14, 2009

Magazines and the Internet

Magazines continue to grow in popularity: the number of magazine users has grown over the past five years at a higher rate than the number of users of all other media except for the internet.

According to the latest data from Mediamark Research & Intelligence (MRI), the internet has shown the greatest growth in total media users (+22.2%) from 2004 to 2008. After the internet, Magazines (+5.7%) surpassed the growth in total users of the other four media.

MRI was selected for this analysis because it is a single-source database that looks at usage across the six media in a consistent manner using an adult population (age 18+) for all. It is also possible to trend MRI data over the past five years or longer.

Trends shown by MRI’s media usage data generally track with what is reported in other media studies such as Nielsen, Scarborough and Arbitron, which are viewed as the currency metrics for television, newspapers and radio respectively.