Is Social Media, Print Media's Life Line?

For me to find out what makes some magazines fail, I had to find out what makes others succeed. Magazines fall into three categories: popular, trade, scholarly. I picked three magazines from each category and looked at the social media presence of each magazine. The results suggested that it didn't matter how much of a social media presence you have; your sales can still drop.

I found readership statistics from New Zealand that date from 2017 - 2018 and 2018 - 2019. While most readership stats from 2017-2019 went down, some either stayed the same or even went up. For example "New Idea", a weekly magazine featuring celebrity news, exclusive interviews, recipes, fashion and health managed to stay around the same over three reads. "New Idea" has a large social media presence. They post pictures with links to stores written by their journalists up to 3-4 times a week on Instagram and have 112k followers. They also have Twitter and Facebook accounts that post similar things. But from what I saw on the website with articles, recipes, prize draws, and competitions, it's what helps with publicity and popularity.
This can also have a downside, because if you publish all your articles online no one will want to pay money for the magazine.
                            
The only magazine that went up considerably (on my list) was New Zealand Geographic. This magazine's average readership went up from 1.4% to 1.9% which is puzzling because New Zealand Geographic doesn't have half as much media presence as some of the other magazines whose sales went down.

Most of the magazines that I looked at had a wider social media presence but lower readership. Cuisine, NZ House and Garden and Woman's Weekly all fit in this category. The Woman's Weekly has a very large social media presence, with heaps of followers across a wide range of social media and yet from 2018-2019 their readership went down by 0.7%. This leads me to think that social media doesn't have a positive impact on print media and success is just random.

What makes this question even more of a dead-end is that when I asked people whether they would buy a magazine subscription because they saw it while scrolling through their preferred social media platform, they all said that they wouldn't. When I asked my mum, she said she would consider buying it as a gift for someone but only if it was close to their birthday.

So, in conclusion, I don't think that social media is all that helpful to any magazine companies. You buy a magazine to look at the pictures or find good articles and recipes. Now in 2020, you can do all of this on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest or the internet. Social media is a competitor not an ally to the print industry.