• by Sara Guaglione , March 9, 2017

The Association of Magazine Media found in its first Magazine Media 360° Brand Audience Report of 2017 that total magazine audience — across print, Web, mobile Web and video — grew to 930 million in January, a 3.7% increase compared to the same month a year ago.

The report covers 128 magazine media brands from 30 companies, representing 95% of magazine readership.

The print and digital audience of these magazine media brands increased by 5.4% compared to January 2016.

The Web audience -- which includes desktop and laptop readers -- dropped 7.6% versus a year ago, a sign of audiences continuing to shift to mobile devices.

Video continues to be the fastest-growing platform for publishers, and its audiences grew by 57.5%.

While mobile Web audiences were growing by double-digit numbers in previous reports, January 2017 saw a modest increase of 1.7%.

MPA believes this was due to several factors, including comScore implementing new technology to its January 2017 Mobile data reporting to detect and eliminate invalid, non-human traffic.

Plus, several of the larger reported brands had technical issues with inoperative tags on their mobile Web pages, causing problems with reports of audience numbers.

The top five magazine brands with the most total audience for January 2017 were ESPN The Magazine, People, Forbes, Allrecipes and WebMD.

The top five magazine brands with the greatest percentage growth in total audience for January 2017, compared to a year ago, were Marie Claire, Elle Decor, Teen Vogue, W and Autoweek.

Last month, MPA released the Brand Audience Report for 2016. It found that ESPN The Magazine, People and Forbes delivered the largest magazine media audiences, and domino, The New Yorker and Harper’s Bazaarshowed the greatest percentage of growth for the year.