• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, August 3, 2007

Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? That question has haunted newspapers, which make their content available for free online--and now, increasingly, magazine publishers may be asking themselves the same thing.

A new joint study released by Nielsen//NetRatings and Mediamark Research Inc. found that most visitors to magazine Web sites are only accessing the brand's content online. An average 83% of all visitors to 23 large-circulation monthly magazines were consuming the magazine content just online, according to Nielsen and MRI--with figures ranging from 65% to 96% for specific titles.

The survey also found that male visitors were more likely than female visitors to consume content just online (90% versus 83%).

Somewhat surprisingly, however, there wasn't much difference between age cohorts in terms of online-only readership: Younger and older readers were as likely to also read the print edition of a magazine.

Nielsen and MRI are making the data available in a single-source database called Net/MRI that will, among other things, provide net figures for print and online readership.

Kathi Love, president and CEO of MRI, remarked: "This new venture provides the advertising and media marketplace with unduplicated audience numbers for print media and their Web sites. It brings the research industry one step closer to measuring the reach of cross-platform advertising, which has increased dramatically with the rise of the Internet as a publishing venue."