Bit of romance for busy young mothers

By Rebecca Finkel

     Talk about a franchise. Twenty years ago when it launched Soap Opera Digest created the soap fan category, and to this day it still dominates it. A year ago it bought its two chief competitors, Soap Opera Magazine and Soap Opera News, leaving only Soap Opera Weekly, a sister publication.
     According to publisher Lisa Vaughan, the Primedia title   owns over 80 percent of the category.
     Soap Opera Digest is the sixth most profitable magazine sold on newsstands. Single copy sales account for almost half of its circulation of 1.1 million.
       Ad pages in 1998 ran about 1,000, and pages for the first half of this year were up 20 percent.
     Vaughan attributes the rise in pages to an increasing need among advertisers to reach young women with families. Packaged-food and cosmetics advertisers are the largest categories in the magazine.
     Most Soap Opera Digest readers are women who either work outside the home or who stay at home but are too busy to watch their favorite soaps during the day. Many tape them for later viewing.
      Vaughan says younger women rely on the magazine to keep them informed about soap opera plots and stars, and she says soap fans have an almost religious attachment to the magazine.
    "I know women who won't subscribe to the magazine because it comes a day or two later," says Vaughan. "They don't want to wait. They do their shopping on Monday to buy it the day it comes out."
    The dedicated soap fan spends $2.99 per issue on Soap Opera Digest. "This is proof of how much they really want it," says Vaughan. "Considering the average household income of the readership is barely $31,000, this tells you how intensely the women are involved in the industry."
      The average soap fan has been watching her favorite show for 10 years, says Vaughan. "They have a personal relationship with the stars. The stars come into their homes every day. They are more influenced by soap stars than any other category of celebrities."
      The average Digest reader is 34 years old, yet the average daytime soap watcher is 45.
      That viewership is huge. More people watch soaps than football, baseball, basketball and late-night talk shows.
     To extend its brand, the magazine launched a daily web site offering features that might also appear in the magazine but also news of stars and chats.
     The site enables the magazine to reach a large audience of soap fans who are beyond the reach of the publication. Research has found that only 18 percent of visitors subscribe to the magazine.
     It's also a younger audience; the average visitor is 28, and three quarters are employed. The site records 3.75 million pages views a month.
     The magazine also runs contests in chain stores. Winners receive a free trip to an annual Soap Opera Digest Awards dinner. It also sponsors mall tours with leading stars in which fans are invited to act out their favorite scenes with the actors.

-Rebecca Finkel is a staff writer for Media Life.