Various photos of The Globe and Mail fronts photographed in the studio at The Globe and Mail in Toronto.Deborah Baic/The Globe and Mail
Canadians turn to The Globe and Mail more than any other publication in the country, with a national weekly readership of 6.3 million across its newspaper and digital products.
Including Report on Business magazine, total readership is 6.9 million, according to publishing-industry researcher Vividata. Broken down by medium, the firm found that The Globe has the highest readership both among Canadian print newspapers and digital products, with 3.8 million cumulative weekly readers apiece.
Vividata released its fourth-quarter 2016 readership numbers Thursday morning. It found that while print newspapers still command an exclusive audience – 46 per cent of all newspaper-brand readers – only 16 per cent exclusively turn to digital products, with 37 per cent seeking a combination of print and digital.
Just under half of all baby boomers now read newspaper content digitally, mostly on mobile devices. Nearly 60 per cent of millennials, meanwhile, turn to mobile – and more than three-quarters of 21- to 34-year-olds still opt for paper editions some of the time.
Across platforms, Vividata found newspapers and magazines reach nine in 10 Canadian adults.
The media-measurement firm gathered its fourth-quarter data from a national sample of 43,400 Canadians aged 12-and-up across 48 markets.
While the researchers cautioned that digital-readership trends could not be established because of recent changes to survey methodology, it revealed year-over-year changes in print readership, with a caution that it had made slight changes to readership screening.
The 3.8 million weekly print Globe readers represented a decline of 4 per cent from the same quarter in 2015. The Toronto Star's cumulative weekly print readership fell 8.1 per cent to 3.6 million, while the National Post's weekly readership rose 13.3 per cent to 2.7 million.
Report on Business magazine led the country in business magazines with 1.7 million readers across print and digital. Since Rogers Media folded its print Canadian Business magazine last year, ROB is now the only national business magazine printed at least 10 times a year.
Later this year, the research firm says, it will expand its data collection to "report on consumer interaction with hundreds of leading websites," adding to a growing number of digital news-consumption habits it measures to paint a more accurate picture of Canadian reading habits.
The company measured cross-platform readership in Canada for 72 daily newspapers and 63 consumer magazines last quarter. The firm was formed from the merger of audience-measurement firms Print Measurement Bureau and NADbank, and began releasing industry data in 2015. The fourth-quarter results combined data from both its 12-month major-market rolling database for the 2016 calendar year and its small-market rolling database covering January, 2015, to December, 2016.