Qmags has released the results of its 2010 Annual Digital Magazine Readership Survey, providing a window into the preferences and behaviors of digital editions subscribers.
Conducted from March 30 to May 4 of this year and released June 23, the survey queried 170,000 randomly selected subscribers to digital editions in the consumer, association and B-to-B space about their digital reading habits. Respondents had to have been digital editions subscribers for at least six months.
Digital magazine consumers are interactive, the survey found, with 60 percent saying they clicked on an article link and 55 percent saying they clicked on a link within an advertisement. Individuals in engineering and technical fields were far and away the biggest users of digital editions (45.2 percent of those surveyed), with R&D/academia the only other occupational category to exceed 10 percent.
Over 60 percent of respondents had read at least three of the past four digital editions received, with over 45 percent spending more than one-half hour reading a magazine. (Only 12.2 percent reported spending less than 15 minutes.) Computers were the preferred devices for reading digital editions, though 16 percent expressed an interest in mobile and 17 percent in reading devices like the iPad and Kindle.
The preferred format (by 54.6 percent) was a print magazine redesigned to fit a computer screen. Print magazine replicas were favored by 22.9 percent of readers, and article summaries with links to complete stories were favored by 22.5 percent. Over three quarters of readers preferred to download their magazines—significantly more than those who chose to view it in their Web browser.
