It is a strong conclusion from the researchers of the 2023 youth survey. Magazines are not popular among young people. More than half of young people (57%) do not read magazines (anymore).
It Youth survey 2023 is published by Mediahuis, WayneParkerKent and Mediatest. The graphs below show the percentage of respondents who indicate that they do not read a magazine. This percentage will be 57% in 2023. That is approximately the same as the figures of the previous year. But considerably more than the 39% from 2020 and the 27.6% from 2019. So you see that the number of young people who do not read print is increasing, but that this figure seems to be stabilizing. It is striking that more men are abandoning print than women.
34% of young people sometimes read a printed magazine
About a third of young people still occasionally read a printed magazine. This percentage has also fallen in recent years. In 2019, 65% of young people sometimes read a magazine. In 2020 that was 52%. In 2022, this percentage dropped to 35% and in 2023, 34% of young people sometimes read print. Women read more magazines than men. And the older the young people are, the more often they read a printed magazine. A quarter of young people who occasionally read a printed magazine have a subscription. Almost half of these young people sometimes buy a magazine separately. The older the young people are, the more often they do this. In addition, women in the age groups 15-21 years and 22-28 years buy a separate magazine more often than men in these age groups.
Dutch people prefer to look at a screen than to read
The Youth Survey shows that young people prefer to look at their screen than pick up a magazine. The research shows that young people between the ages of 13 and 15 watch an average of 3.2 hours of video. This includes everything from linear TV, on demand via streaming services and video via social media platforms such as YouTube. They also indicate that they will spend an average of 3.9 hours on social media in 2023.
If we compare this with the rest of the Netherlands, we see that 33% of Dutch people read or browse something during the day. About 10% of this consists of magazines, according to figures from DPG Growth’s Day in a Life Research. In this report, researchers looked at the media behavior of Dutch people. Watching (80%) and being active online (53%) are also favorite activities among average Dutch people.
Online magazines are also losing young readers
What about the online magazines? About one fifth of young people sometimes read a magazine online (19%). We see that men in the 29 to 35 age group do this the most and that they do this much more often compared to the research in 2022. But if you look at the long-term averages, you will also see a decrease here. In 2019, 34% sometimes read an online magazine. In 2020 that was 29%. And in 2022 this was 17%. Here too, the percentages appear to be stabilizing after a period of decline. A positive outlier is the growth of online magazine consumption among men aged 29-25.
Young people and news
We previously wrote an extensive article about the news consumption of young people. Where do they get their news from and are they willing to pay for it? Read that article here.
Credit: photo of Giulia Bertelli via Unsplash. Thanks to Mediahuis, WayneParkerKent, MediaTest and DPG Growth for the sources.