Circulation of Online Genre Magazines

A month ago, I posted Online Genre Magazines: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. At the time, I stated "Based on my experience with online magazines, a top publication like Strange Horizons likely has between 1,000 to 2,000 unique visitors per day. Most other top markets will have 400 to 1000 visitors a day, and obscure markets will have 10 to 100 visitors a day at most."

However, the one weak point with my estimate was I didn't have current access to the website statistics of many online magazines. In response to my call to examine web stats, I received a large number of emails from editors, and a good number of these gave me access to their statistics. While a few were fine with being named, most wanted to stay anonymous. In honor of this I am not naming either the editors or the magazines who provided me with this information.

It appears that my original estimates appear to be correct, aside from being somewhat optimistic. Here are my revised estimates:

• Top publications like Strange Horizons likely have between 800 and 1,500 unique visitors per day.
• Most other top markets will have 300 to 800 visitors a day.
• The majority of obscure markets will have 10 to 80 visitors a day at most, although a few climb into the lower hundreds per day.

Please note that, as I previously mentioned, places like Tor.com receive far more traffic than this since they focus on being more than a simple online magazine. Basically, the creation of an online community tied in with a genre magazine or publishing company brings many more visitors to a site. But most of these visitors are still not reading the online fiction.

One surprising finding was that the submission guidelines were the most popular pages at almost every magazine whose stats I examined. This means that for the less popular online magazines, the number of visitors who actually read their fiction may be less than the number who visit the site merely to learn how to submit stories.

Finally, not every unique visitor to an online magazine is truly unique. While I was working on this analysis, one print editor contacted me and said many people make the mistake of considering every visitor to an online genre magazine to be a unique visitor who only shows up once a month.

This is absolutely correct. Many visitors to online magazines return multiple times per month, just as a reader of a print magazine like Analog returns to one issue a number of times. So while Strange Horizons may technically have an estimated 30,000 plus visitors per month, many of these visitors return time and again to the site. This means it is unlikely even the biggest online genre magazines have surpassed print genre magazines in readership.

The other surprising finding is that major podcasts like StarShipSofa and Escape Pod have truly astounding levels of listenership, with tens of thousands of downloads per month. This doesn't prove people are listening to an entire show when they download a podcast. But since the act of downloading is a more dedicated act than surfing to a website--and since it would be rare for someone to download the same podcast more than once--I'm inclined to believe many genre podcasts should actually rank among the biggest online genre magazines out there.

I'll leave the comments below open for a bit, so please let me know if you think my analysis is on the mark or not. And if any of the editors I've consulted wish to state their view on all this for the record, feel free to do so.

Comments

[Jonathan Laden]

Audio much more popular than written fic? Surprising, indeed.

[Jason Sanford]

I think the reason podcasts are more popular than written fiction is the general public have so many iPods and mp3 players. That allows people to easily access genre podcasts.

I predict once genre magazines begin to take advantage of the many users who have Kindles and ebook readers, you will see a similar trend as with podcasts.

[steve davidson]

soooo, my blog gets as much traffic as "most other top markets" in the genre fiction realm.

Interesting. Maybe I ought to start soliciting for stories...

[Natt]

We started a horror-comedy podcast in time for Hallowe'en (the next episode is out at the end of this week), and have had 1,500 downloads of various kinds so far. The blog which accompanies the episodes (but also has genre reviews, news and other things) has 820 visits so far (actually, they may not even be visits, just pageviews now I think about it).

I think, at the moment, podcasts are an easy commitment for people to make. They're usually free, and they can be downloaded when available, taking up no physical space until you decide to listen to them. You also don't have to be at your computer to listen to them, whereas to read a story online a phone or Ipod screen is quite annoying.

Those are my thoughts...

(If you're interested, the In The Gloaming website is here: http://inthegloamingpodcasts.wordpress.com
Episode 1, Dead Skinny, featuring some of Britain's best young comics & Celebrity Love Islander Michael 'Beppe' Greco is here: http://bit.ly/1uP2Xq )

[James Bloomer]

The numbers who download podcasts are also not necessarily the numbers who listen to them. I used to subscribe to loads of podcasts in iTunes, which automatically downloaded every week, but I actually listened to hardly any of them. As many feed readers support podcasts now it's possible that this effect is happening a lot.

Interesting results however...

[Jason Sanford]

BDO: Excellent point about the automatic downloads of podcasts. So maybe even those numbers aren't as cut and dry as I thought.

I also wanted to expand on the print editor's quote I mentioned in my post. The editor is Sheila Williams and she gave me permission to include her entire quote: "You, and, many others on the internet, seem to make the mistake of considering every visitor to an online site to be a unique visitor who only shows up once a month, while assuming that readers of Analog read the whole issue in one sitting--not to mention overlooking the pass-along readers who share the magazine with the subscriber and who probably consult the magazine several times a month as well."

As I mentioned in the post, Sheila is dead on about this. It is difficult to directly compare the readerships of print magazines and online magazines. But as my analysis suggests, online genre magazines likely haven't overtaken print genre mags in total number of readers.

[Sean Wallace]

I'll point out several things: Readership is quite a bit different than circulation, and rather harder to work out, for print magazines. It's a guess, usually just a multiplier. But even harder to calculate for online, considering how much is spread through some like p2p networks, as an example. The problem is once you start going down that road, you get mired in useless comparisons, between print and online. You'd be chasing that poor rabbit way down the hole at that point :p

The sad fact is that people don't generally read all the contents of a print magazine. It's a silly fallacy to assume that print subscribers read everything from front to back. So there's no easy way to determining what portion, or proportion of a magazine is actually being read, for print. (Not like you can with an online magazine.) I suppose you could run a survey to find out, but that might be a bit expensive.

Either way I find it generally too much complex (and pointless) to play the "let's compare print-vs-online game." Bottom-line questions: are authors getting paid (well)? Yes. Are readers enjoying the stories? Yes. (One hopes so). So, is there more that is actually important to the end-consumer, at the end of the day?

I just got back from Philcon, where I attended a number of panels on the future of short fiction, and it was noted from a number of audience members that basically all they want is "access" to great fiction, and they didn't care where it came from . . . but that it was really convenient to find it online, because it was impossible to find it otherwise.

"online genre magazines likely haven't overtaken print genre mags in total number of readers."

Sorry, I don't see the need for a comparison. It's totally irrevelant, by any standard, because each model is different. Let's say Tor.com is getting a million page views a month (you can doublecheck with their advertising kit, readily available), and hitting its goals, whatever they may be, then it's succeeding on its own terms. It doesn't have to compete with print. Or any preconceived notions that go with that. That's not their business model.