ARTICLE: The Daily “Periodical”: How Traditional and Emerging Magazine Media Appeal to Snapchat Users

This study investigated the magazine readership preferences of 320 Snapchat users, aged eighteen to twenty-five, enrolled at a large public university in the Southwest. Participants were asked about their engagement with twenty-eight magazines whose content was available in Snapchat in March 2018. Most respondents (89.7%) indicated having viewed content from at least one magazine. The three most popular magazines on Snapchat— Cosmopolitan, People, and Teen Vogue— matched the top two categories in which respondents indicated the strongest interest: entertainment and fashion. The student readers reported treating magazine brands on Snapchat as periodicals, with most seeking content only weekly or monthly. The findings contribute to the existing literature on the magazine form in digital contexts and within the uses-and-gratifications framework. Young readers’ clear preference for socioemotional over cognitively enriching content also has practical implications for magazine publishers se