Cutting through the brush, print magazine still most popular

Trying to justify a position using solid figures sometimes can lead to incredibly confusing stories. We get that a lot with companies trying to show that digital advertising work.

In this Eric Sass piece in the digital MediaDailyNews, we find a bewildering mass of figures and interpretations (sample: "Out of 187 million American adults who interacted with magazine content and ads in the period covered by the AMS, 54% did so via the Web or mobile platforms, including smartphones, eReaders, tablets and other mobile devices. However, 95% of the total magazine audience still consumes magazine content and advertising in print form, according to Affinity, and almost half of the audience overlapped, with 48% consuming via both print and digital channels.").

Cutting through all the underbrush, we find Sass summing up the numbers (I'm guessing "exposures" = readers or pages read) "1.278 billion exposures were print-only, involving no digital component; 135 million involved both print and digital components; and 166 million, or 11% of the total, involved only digital components." In other words, the vast majority of magazine readers still look at "dead tree technology."