Digital magazine sales are still tiny overall, but titles like Cosmo see big growth

Nearly 65 percent of U.S. magazines now have a digital replica edition, but those editions make up just under three percent of overall circulation: That’s the latest news from the Alliance for Audited Media (formerly the Audit Bureau of Circulations), which on Thursday released its report on U.S. magazine circulation in the second half of 2012. For some individual titles, though, digital growth was a lot more impressive.

289 U.S. magazines reported that they’d sold 7.9 million digital replica editions in the last six months of 2012. That’s 2.4 percent of total circulation — up from less than 1 percent in the second half of 2011, and up from 1.7 percent in the first six months of this year. (AAM’s definition of a digital replica is that it contains “the same editorial and photojournalism as the national print edition,” though that material can be arranged differently on a tablet; nearly all digital magazines fall into this category.)

The growth looks more impressive on an individual title level, where some magazines made big gains in digital sales: Game Stop, already by far the top magazine by digital circulation, increased that figure by 89 percent, while Cosmopolitan upped its digital circulation by nearly 40 percent in the second half of the year.

Here are the top 25 U.S. consumer magazines by digital circulation in the second half of 2012. When the information was available, I included how much the magazine’s digital circulation grew over the first six months of the year.

Game Informer (GameStop), digital circulation: 2,305,816 (+89% over first half of 2012)
Maxim (Alpha Media Group): 259,529 (-8.9%)
Cosmopolitan (Hearst): 254,751 (+37.2%)
National Geographic (National Geographic): 160,077 (+18.9%)
Poder Hispanic (Televisa): 149,838 (-12.3%)
Reader’s Digest (Reader’s Digest): 147,149
Taste of Home (Reader’s Digest): 103,961
Popular Science (Bonnier): 98,389 (+5.8%)
ESPN the Magazine (ESPN): 92,197 (+20.4%)
OK! (American Media): 88,347
Parenting (Bonnier): 87,253 (+16.7%)
Men’s Health (Rodale): 85,842 (+44.2%)
O, the Oprah Magazine (Hearst): 84,632 (+4.2%)
Wired (Condé Nast): 84,118 (+22.3%)
Us Weekly (Wenner): 81,611
Nylon (Jaclynn B. Jarrett): 77,469 (+2.5%)
GQ (Condé Nast): 74,806 (+24.6%)
Food Network Magazine (Hearst): 67,727
Women’s Health (Rodale): 66,555 (+29.5%)
Star (American Media): 59,903
New Yorker (Condé Nast): 59,471
Esquire (Condé Nast): 57,795
Martha Stewart Living (Time Inc.): 56,068
Glamour (Condé Nast): 53,794
Vanity Fair (Condé Nast): 53,735