Online Women’s Magazines: Differences in Perceptions between Print and Online Magazines among Female Readers

Kavita Karan,Chang Sup Park,Wenjing Xie

doi:10.4236/ajc.2016.41004

Abstract

Popular women’s magazines have gone online and are gaining increased readership because of their interactive content, videos, and discussion forums. This study examines women’s perceptions and behaviors toward online women’s magazines based on an online survey of 257 female magazine readers. We found that, compared with their print counterparts, online magazines were perceived to be easier to read, skip ads, order products, search for, save and share information and comment on articles. Moreover, most female readers are positive toward the technological merits of online women’s magazines. Younger, less-educated, and less affluent readers showed a more positive attitude toward online women’s magazines than older, more educated, and more affluent readers did. However, female readers’ involvement with and engagement in the interactive features of online magazines were found to be low. Implications and suggestions for future research were discussed.

Highlights

Online magazines are evolving rapidly and gaining increasing popularity (Royal, 2008), with many women en-How to cite this paper: Karan, K., Park, C
H1 predicted that female readers will perceive online women’s magazines to be easier to read than print magazines
A little more than half (58.4%) of the total respondents answered they have ever accessed discussion forums of online women’s magazines, while 41.6% were not using such forums: 37.4% said they visit discussion forums “occasionally” and only 5.4% said “regularly.” The time spent on discussion forums was short: 68.1% stayed at an online discussion forum less than 20 minutes when they accessed them. 21.9% of respondents stayed at a discussion forum from 20 to 40 minutes and 10% stayed more than 40 minutes when they visited a discussion forum

Summary

Introduction

Online magazines are evolving rapidly and gaining increasing popularity (Royal, 2008), with many women en-How to cite this paper: Karan, K., Park, C. They are proving to be a successful medium used by publishers to attract readers and advertisers. Many traditional magazines are running websites or are about to launch their online versions in order to look for ways to draw the attention from audiences and are not cannibalizing their print counterparts (Kaiser, 2005). Due to such efforts by publishers and the increase of online readers, online magazines are becoming available across almost every sphere of our life such as beauty, health, children, relationship, traveling, shopping, and sports (Jue, 2009)

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