Audience Engagement Digital Publishing
2 mins read

Which was the most influential lifestyle magazine in 2020?

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Salience Search Marketing has just released its Lifestyle Magazine Influence Report looking at the 35 most influential lifestyle fashion magazines in the UK, ranking them on three key metrics – organic visibility, digital brand reach, and social media reach.

The report also provides key indicators of SEO performance, such as backlinks and referring domains as well as metrics that include sentiment and social followers. Key findings within the report include:

  • Elle has the largest social media following, with a total of 17.4 million across Twitter, Instagram and Facebook
  • Cosmopolitan is the most searched for brand, with an average of over 88k searches in 2020, despite this dropping 2% compared to 2019
  • Glamour Magazine has seen search YoY increase by 56%, the largest increase by any lifestyle magazine brand.
  • Vanity Fair has the most backlinks of any lifestyle magazine brand, with 12 million
  • Complex has received the most brand mentions in the last 30 days, although a 37% visibility decrease in search engine visibility has hampered its overall performance
  • Highsnobiety saw an impressive 106% in search engine visibility increase, one of the largest percentage moves
  • Essence saw the biggest decrease, with -69% visibility

“A main factor considered in the report, when looking at influence, is search engine visibility. If you’re not seen on search engines, you simply can’t reach people,” a spokesperson for Salience told WNIP.

“A key aspect that can influence organic visibility is backlinks. Vanity Fair has the lion’s share, with 12 million. However, Vanity Fair has seen an overall visibility decrease which shows the importance of the quality of the back link and not necessarily the volume.

“Grazia, on the other hand only has 53.9k backlinks, yet this brand has seen the biggest percentage increase in its overall visibility. Although this cannot be solely attributed to the backlinks, they definitely play a part.”

The Top Influencers

Taking into account all the metrics combined, Salience allocated an accumulative score to each magazine. Based on these scores, the top five most influential lifestyle magazines for 2020 were:

  1. Cosmopolitan
  2. Elle
  3. Vanity Fair
  4. Harpers Bazaar
  5. Vogue

The full report can be download here:
salience.co.uk/insight/reports/digital-lifestyle-magazine