Jeff Beckham

A couple of weeks ago, the Bivings Report published an analysis of US consumer magazines and the way they use the web. They looked at the top 50 commercial magazines (according to circulation).

Among their key findings:

• More magazines are using reporter blogs in 2007 than in 2006. Fifty-eight percent of the magazines researched now offer reporter blogs on their sites, compared to just 40 percent in 2006. Ninety three percent of these blogs allow reader comments, while just 31 percent use blogrolls, or links to external blogs.
• Newspapers fared better than magazines in nearly every category in 2007. The only exception is the use of tags; four percent of magazines use tags compared to just one percent of newspapers.
• The usage of required registration increased since last year from 38 percent to 42 percent.
• Video usage nearly doubled in 2007, with 60 percent of the magazine websites we researched now offering video content. In 2006, just 34 percent of the websites offered this feature.

Generally, the report finds that magazines are slower at adopting new web functionality than newspapers.

Applied locally, their findings are generally true - magazines like Texas Monthly have been slower to adopt new web functionality than the Austin American-Statesman - although TM has made significant strides in this area lately.

One other note from the study: Although 64 percent of the sites surveyed offer news feeds via RSS, none of them place advertisements in those feeds. This represents a significant opportunity to expand their advertising reach to those customers who look for content first via news feeds.