At the Claymanite, we have written scores of articles about the shift to "e-media" from print. We didn't have to tell you that your newspapers were shrinking. The fact that your favorite trade publication was also getting smaller did not elude you. Given this, we were pleased to get a new study just released by Gardner Research, the research arm of Gardner Publications, Inc. If you are in the manufacturing arena, you may be aware of the Gardner titles including Modern Machine Shop, Plastics Technology, Automotive Design, Production Machining and a number of others.

Gardner decided to go where few others have traveled by surveying their diverse audience (covering a portion of readers of all of their publications) to gauge their preferences in how they use various media in today's media-heavy world.

The results were very surprising in some areas. When asked where they go to find information on new products and processes, 90% of those surveyed said they use trade magazines. Search engines, supplier websites and industry websites were right behind but who of you would have guessed that trade magazines would still lead the day in late 2010 when the survey was done? If you are like us, you might think it is only the 50 and older crowd that is still "reading." Not true. When the numbers were broken down by people 50 and older versus people under 50, there was a slightly stronger preference for trade magazines by the older crowd but by only three percentage points more than the younger audience. Conversely, although you might expect the younger people to dominate the online options, again there was only about a 3% difference between the preference of the younger audience for using search engines and industry websites versus the older audience.

What does this mean? It means our perception that all of this would be age-based does not necessarily translate into reality. At this point in time, the preferences for print by the older crowd and online for the younger crowd are really minimal. In short, plenty of people under the age of 50 are still counting on their favorite trade publication for valuable information and people over 50 are not adverse to going online for the information they need.

It will be interesting to watch this trend over the next year or two. As the older people retire and phase out and the younger people take over the world, the trend towards more online will obviously grow but at what speed is anybody's guess.

This is a valuable study that presents a good "moment in time" review of media preferences. The publisher was kind enough to allow us to link to Garder's study. We hope you will consider reading it.  

Click here to read the study.