The Magazine Publishers of America (MPA) announced today that traffic to consumer magazine websites in the second quarter rose 8.5% over the same time period in 2007. Consumer magazine websites averaged 69.7 million unique monthly visitors during the second quarter of 2008, a number that exceeded traffic in 2007 by over 5 million.

Perhaps even more reassuring for the struggling print industry, is that the increase is more than double the rate of growth for the overall U.S. Internet audience. Also, visitors were "stickier" meaning that they stuck around the site longer.