New audience figures show a few magazine brands grew their reach substantially during the Covid-19 pandemic, while many saw decline.
Most weekly titles struggled with the change in the market brought about by the UK lockdown, the figures from Pamco show, but celebrity magazines Hello! and OK! both bucked this trend and grew their audiences.
Scroll down for the figures in full
Hello! grew its total brand reach by 28% to 12.2m, the largest reach among the weekly magazine brands. But Woman’s reach fell by 30%, the Radio Times by 19%, The Week by 12% and Country Life by 10%.
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Monthly magazine titles were less affected by the lockdown, with roughly half recording growth in their total brand reach.
Vogue and Tatler were up by more than a third (35% and 36% respectively), but Elle fell by a quarter (26%) and Harper’s Bazaar by 22%, while top-selling women’s monthly Cosmopolitan was down by 11%.
By far the biggest overall gain was made by Esquire, which more than tripled its total brand reach (up by 259%).
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BBC Good Food, a paid-for monthly, grew its total brand reach by 23% to 15.8m, the largest reach of any title.
Pamco figures combine a print readership survey with Comscore digital audience estimates for a given month to come to a total de-duplicated brand reach figure. The figures in this report are monthly.
Comscore figures for March together with readership survey figures for the year to the end of March have been compared with those for November 2019 and the year to the end of December.
Weekly magazine brands (inc. Comscore for March 2020)
TBR = Total Brand Reach
| Magazine brand | TBR (000) | Phone (000) | Tablet (000) | Desktop (000) | Print (000) | TBR % change |
| Hello! | 12,181 | 9,523 | 1,336 | 577 | 1,633 | 28% |
| Radio Times | 8,133 | 5,534 | 651 | 1,221 | 1,432 | -19% |
| OK! | 6,448 | 4,577 | 318 | 220 | 1,797 | 7% |
| Time Out FREE | 3,884 | 2,678 | 175 | 566 | 895 | -5% |
| Closer | 2,513 | 1,732 | 174 | 47 | 787 | -9% |
| Heat | 2,134 | 1,432 | 128 | 55 | 607 | -7% |
| Take a Break | 1,756 | 42 | – | 20 | 1,715 | -1% |
| Grazia | 1,343 | 871 | 87 | 91 | 419 | -8% |
| Private Eye (fortnightly) | 1,105 | 1,105 | -2% | |||
| The Big Issue | 1,066 | 11 | – | 8 | 1,047 | -6% |
| The Week | 858 | 201 | 29 | 213 | 507 | -12% |
| Chat | 798 | 26 | 2 | 10 | 764 | -1% |
| Woman’s Own | 735 | 41 | – | – | 702 | – |
| Country Life | 709 | 234 | 37 | 72 | 389 | -10% |
| Woman’s Weekly | 655 | 22 | 8 | 1 | 628 | -4% |
| Woman | 556 | 52 | 3 | 5 | 500 | -30% |
| Pick Me Up! | 463 | 26 | 2 | 10 | 430 | -3% |
| My Weekly | 334 | 30 | – | 7 | 299 | 8% |
Monthly magazine brands (inc. Comscore March 2020):
| Magazine brand | TBR (000) | Phone (000) | Tablet (000) | Desktop (000) | Print (000) | TBR % change |
| BBC Good Food | 15,857 | 12,290 | 1,406 | 3,045 | 628 | 23% |
| Cosmopolitan | 3,764 | 2,965 | 140 | 295 | 580 | -11% |
| Good Housekeeping | 2,950 | 1,542 | 246 | 358 | 1,036 | -7% |
| Vogue | 2,294 | 1,304 | 214 | 172 | 796 | 35% |
| Esquire (bi-monthly) | 2,048 | 1,701 | 220 | 124 | 55 | 259% |
| Vanity Fair | 1,590 | 1,149 | 217 | 105 | 172 | 18% |
| Woman & Home | 1,371 | 798 | 132 | 74 | 427 | 7% |
| Elle | 1,184 | 719 | 58 | 107 | 346 | -26% |
| GQ | 1,109 | 701 | 100 | 163 | 212 | -6% |
| Men’s Health | 965 | 467 | 16 | 85 | 458 | 8% |
| Women’s Health | 855 | 533 | 18 | 13 | 334 | 22% |
| Empire | 717 | 372 | 30 | 70 | 282 | -13% |
| Red | 628 | 314 | 39 | 56 | 248 | -3% |
| Tatler | 555 | 389 | 83 | 4 | 102 | 36% |
| Harper’s Bazaar | 483 | 249 | 17 | 80 | 157 | -22% |
Digital only (Comscore March 2020):
| Magazine brand | Total digital (000) | Phone (000) | Tablet (000) | Desktop (000) | Total digital % change |
| Digital Spy | 7,559 | 6,500 | 632 | 603 | 79% |
| Wired | 4,460 | 3,531 | 419 | 682 | 437% |
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