MAGAZINES BOUNCE BACK WITH INCREASED PRINT RUNS

By Wayne Robinson | 11 March 2022

Australia’s biggest print magazines are getting bigger, with the big two – Coles and Woolworths' Fresh – gaining significantly more readers in the past 12 months.

*Australia's biggest print run: Coles magazine*

In good news for the nation's magazine printers, all but three of the top 25 magazines saw an uptick in readership, with the Foxtel magazine up by a whopping 50 per cent, and News Corp's Taste.com.au magazine up b y 48.5 per cent.

The Coles magazine, printed by IVE, now has a print run of 1.8 million a month, with the November, December and Easter issues hitting two million copies. Readership of the magazine went up by 6.6 per cent, to 4.99 million, in 2021, compared to the previous year.

Woolworth’s Fresh, printed by Ovato, saw its readership grow by even more, up by 10.7 per cent to 4.64 million people, with the print run now 1.75 million a month, topped off by the mega Christmas issue, which saw Ovato pump out 2.5 million copies.

Both Coles and Fresh are free, the biggest selling paid-for title is Better Homes & Gardens, which benefits from what is effectively a 90-minute advert on Channel 7 each Friday. Its readership rose by 2.7 per cent in the year to 1.62 million. Ovato is the printer, as shareholder Are Media is the publisher.

Free magazine Bunnings is now the fourth highest circulating title in the country, it now has 500,000 copies printed for in-store distribution, with readership up by 5.4 per cent to 1.5 million. The News Corp published Taste.com.au magazine was one of the two fastest growing over the past 12 months, its readership went up by half, to 794,000 from 535,000, and it has now overtaken Women's Day, which grew by 1.5 per cent.

In more good news for the magazine printing sector, according to Roy Morgan research more than 11 million Australians aged 14 or over now read print magazines, an increase of 1.4 per cent, to 52.4 per cent of them, compared with the previous year.

Of the top 25 magazines only two - New Idea and Take 5 - saw a decline in circulation, with even the Qantas magazine seeing an uptick, just 0.3 per cent in its case.