Weekly magazine audience data what’s to be done with them?

It is usually considered obvious that a magazine released only at intervals (weekly, monthly, quarterly) can have a prolonged “issue life� – i.e. the time it takes to get all of its audience, and that the content of a magazine can have great influence on its “issue life� (TV listings have little interest after the fact; home decorating ideas are of interest any time). Little research has been done to quantify this in the U.S. Some sketchy measurements were done decades ago, deriving little data for very few books. Clever work was done from these measurements to develop “audience accumulation curves� for individual titles, which produced reasonable looking data, but they were based more on intelligent theory than data. These have been used relatively little by Media Planners. They were predicated on so little hard data that they could be called alchemy rather than estimates. They also were not particularly actionable.

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