Did Podcasts Contribute To The Decline Of Magazines?

Between 2019 and 2022, total audiences for magazine companies decreased by 38.56 percent, according to wordsrated.com. Print magazines have been losing readers for several decades. Legacy publications such as Entertainment Weekly, Health, National Geographic, and countless others have gone from cultural icons to neglected antiques to admired from afar.

Consider how far magazines has declined from the top of the cultural zeitgeist.

By 1970, LIFE was “America’s ‘favorite magazine’ with over eight million subscribers.” Furthering the data, LIFE had an estimated pass-along rate “of four to five people per copy; each issue reached as many as 40 million people.”

People Magazine once had a readership of 46.6 million adults in 2009, the largest audience of any American magazine. But by 2018, its readership significantly declined to 35.9 million. The shrinkage was happening and there was no way to stop it.

The prevailing wisdom is the rise of the internet led to the downfall of print magazines. But is that conventional wisdom true. In the teenage years of the internet, we were all lead to believe that information would be at our fingertips. Just a search box away?

What we did collectively experience, however, is that the internet is less than superhighway and…