I'm trying to hunt down the circulation numbers for the major cycling magazines for a future post that I am working on. Unfortunately, this data is harder to find than one would think it should be. Here's what I've got so far, but I wonder if there is anyone out there that may be able to help me out:
The chart is ordered from greatest circulation to least with the unknown mags sequenced by my best educated guess. A few things to note.
- I included Outside magazine because they cover mountain biking in at least every issue that I have seen so far, although it is not their primary purpose.
- The data is from 2005. It comes from the Magazine Publishers Association which appears to be the largest auditing bureau for magazines in North America.
- The statistics are circulation numbers per issue and include both subscriptions and newsstand sales.
- Mountain Bike Action is published by Hi-Torque which claims to have several hundred thousand readers of its bike magazines which includes MBA but also BMX oriented magazines. I'm guessing they have about 100,000 MBA readers.
- I believe Dirt Rag's numbers are about 50,000 based on a press flyer I picked up at Interbike, but I can't be sure since I have lost it.
- I'm not insinuating that the magazines whose numbers I cannot locate are not being straight forward, I just have not found them yet.
I put a copy of the original source spreadsheet out on Google Docs so you can reference it in case you're interested in any other popular magazine numbers.
Anyway, thought you might find it interesting. I'll save some analysis for later, but I didn't want to sit on these numbers too long. Besides, I thought maybe some of you savvy Internet types or industry insiders might be able to fill in some of the holes. Thanks.
