There has been a lot of speculation about the effect of the Internet on the consumption of other media. Starting from the premise that there are still only 24 hours in a day, a logical question is – where did the time people are spending on-line come from? One hypothesis is that time spent on-line is time that would otherwise be allocated to other media. We question this view. Our hypothesis is that the time spent reading magazines and the time spent on-line do not exist in a simple trading relationship. Magazine reading is not being swapped for on-line time.

To test our hypothesis, we looked at two media sources that collect “time spent� information—MRI for magazines and Media Metrix for on-line. As you may know, MRI quantifies data by average issue audience; Media Metrix uses a monthly time frame. For the purpose of this comparison, all data was converted to a monthly basis.

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