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The Globe and Mail has a national readership of 7.4 million people across all platforms, counting weekly Globe and Mail print/digital readers and monthly Report on Business magazine print/digital readers.
The Globe also has the country's leading digital audience of 4.9 million readers a week.
First-quarter research results from Vividata, a new venture that surveys 38,000 consumers about the reach of 113 publications, suggests that 80 per cent of Canadian adults read a newspaper each week, while 70 per cent have perused a magazine.
Print readership remains relatively strong, especially on weekends, even as publications across Canada struggle with declining print advertising revenue. Seventy per cent of newspaper readers consumed stories in print only or in some mixture of print and digital formats, and The Globe's print audience held steady at 3.9 million, trailing only the Toronto Star.
The remaining 30 per cent read newspapers only digitally, as mobile devices – notably smartphones – grab a greater share of total readership.
The lure of print is still strongest for magazine readers, 55 per cent of whom read only in print. Just 8 per cent read magazines solely in digital form, despite the advent of editions tailored to tablets and bundled subscriptions such as Texture, an app controlled by a consortium of publishers.
Report on Business Magazine recorded the largest readership of any business-focused magazine with 1.5 million readers across print and digital.
The Vividata survey reflects readership between April, 2015, and March, 2016, but due to tweaks in methodology aimed at measuring digital reading more precisely, the survey's digital results should not be compared to fourth-quarter results from last April.
"Given the evolving media environment, with shifts in media behaviour and mobile usage, Vividata leveraged our ability to refine the questionnaire for the 2016 survey," Sara Hill, the company's president and chief executive officer, said in a statement.
Digital and print-digital readership is highest among readers between the ages of 18 and 34, at 38 per cent, and daily newspapers reach 77 per cent of millennials, compared with 85 per cent of adults 50 and over.
Editor's Notes: The original print and digital versions of this story imprecisely said The Globe and Mail has a national readership of 7.4 million across all platforms. In fact, that number includes weekly Globe and Mail print/digital readers and monthly Report on Business magazine print/digital readers. They also said incorrectly that The Globe has the leading digital audience of 5.6 million readers. In fact, The Globe's weekly digital readership is 4.9 million, which is the highest in Canada. This digital version has been corrected.
James Bradshaw