Affluent ones do not fancy magazines any more

dDon't miss the penultimate paragraph.

Joe

+++

Magazine Readership Off Sharply Among Affluent

By Jack Neff

BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) -- Magazine readership among the affluent plunged 16% in the past year as the group spent 12% more time using the internet
and sharply stepped up purchases of e-readers and tablet computers, according to the annual Ipsos Mendelsohn Affluent Survey.

The survey of heads of household making at least $100,000 annually also finds that, despite the widespread belief that millennials are more likely to reject or avoid advertising than their elders, younger affluent consumers are actually more interested in ads in all media, including magazines, than their elders.
Magazine readership has slipped modestly in some prior years of the annual survey, which this year garnered more than 13,800 responses, but this is the first double-digit decline, said Ipsos Mendelsohn President Bob Shullman.
Mr. Shullman said the year-over-year shift represents something he's seen daily on his commute into Manhattan over the past year: the widespread disappearance of magazines and print material in favor of e-readers and other mobile devices. "I was talking to the guy who runs the newsstand at my rail station," Mr. Shullman said, "and he said, 'Bob, I'm basically doing half what I was a year ago.'" Mr. Shullman said he believes much of the shift also comes from traditional media stepping up efforts to drive people to their websites.
The same content in different venues?
"The consumer is getting more and more comfortable with the alternative platforms," he said, adding that he believes affluents are simply getting their content in a different format, not doing away with it.
The Ipsos survey was completed in June, only two months after the launch of Apple's iPad, but it already shows nearly a million of the nation's more than 44 million affluent heads of household owned tablet computers and another 2 million owned e-readers.
Fewer titles, fewer issues read, TV stable
Another 3.1 million of the affluent said they plan to buy such devices in the next year. That was among factors helping fuel a 16% decline in both the average number of magazine titles and the number of individual issues read annually by affluent heads of household to 5.9 and 13.3, respectively, Mr. Shullman said. Average weekly hours of TV viewing, on the other hand, remained essentially unchanged at 17.6 hours.
The good news for advertisers, even magazine advertisers, is that more than 80% of the affluent have seen some TV or magazine advertising in the past six months, and half or more say they have considerable or some interest in such ads.
Measuring interest in various forms of advertising among the affluent for the first time, the survey found heads of household ages 18 to 34 more receptive to advertising than their elders in all but one medium: newspapers.
Business and financial news readership and TV viewership appear to have been particularly hard hit in the past year, Mr. Shullman said, and that appears linked to a growing number of affluents losing interest in investing in financial markets, with 7% fewer planning to invest in stocks or mutual funds -- the second straight annual decline.

http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=145867