Making comparisons of online and offline magazines is difficult we’re told. Apples and oranges, some say. But apples and oranges have more similarity than difference. They are spherical and roughly the same size. They’re classified as fruit, often eaten as dessert, contain vitamins and antioxidants and despised by children.

So let’s try to make some sort of comparison between magazines.

There are two types of online magazine :

* Deep, where a single website is developed into a complex structure holding many types of content and advertising.

* Wide, where distributed sites, usually on separate domains, each cover a single, niche topic area.

The advantages of the latter are said to be better search engine optimization and increased linkage possibilities, plus the sites don’t have to be launched all at once with a full staff in place. They can be built up gradually over time, with multiple cost savings.

The wide variety, like Syntagma, are becoming quite popular now, and are often referred to as “blog networks”, a name that gives a false impression of what they are capable of being.

In terms of comparisons with print magazines, Syntagma has 20 or so sites averaging up to 1000 visitors a day, and another 25 newer ones with much less than that. One thousand a day rolls out to 30,000 a month.

In print terms, 30,000 readers for a monthly magazine would work out around 10,000 copies sold — an average of three people read each copy. Over the top 20 sites, that’s the equivalent of 200,000 copies a month. Add on 50,000 for the other 25 newer sites, and you have a “print sale” of a quarter of a million copies per month, which is very respectable for a popular, upper-mid-ranking print title.

Add to that our growth rate of 300pc+ per year and the comparison becomes intriguing.

Differences? There are a few. Syntagma is given away free, supported only by advertising. But, whereas a free sheet in the print market is rarely taken seriously, a website has to be consciously accessed, so carries more weight.

My point is that our readers are all volunteers. They turn up because they want to, not because we stick it through their doors. The free/paid distinction is therefore meaningless online. We can compare our numbers directly with paid-for, off-the-newsstand magazines.

I’m often asked about the demographic of our readership. The beauty of the “wide” model is that different sites cater for different demographics. For example, we used to have a fairly elderly British audience at Royal Anecdotes until we changed its direction to following the antics of the younger members of the Royal family. Now the site gets flooded with younger traffic from forums following Prince William, Prince Harry and their girlfriends. Amazingly, 80pc of that traffic now comes from the USA.

Comparisons are odious, it’s said, but only to the losing side. It is possible to compare and contrast off- and online publishing enterprises. Interestingly, the newer online press often comes off better in terms of readership. The trends are good in some respects, but are thought to be less so in others.

As more people go online, they will become familiar with sourcing their information needs from the internet. This can only grow the market substantially.

The exponential increase in mobile technology, which on the surface might work against us — why would anyone want to read the Wall Street Journal on their mobile phone? — may actually boost web magazines because they are specifically adapted to the screen. Moreover, in the Far East, the Japanese and Koreans are quite happy to read whole novels on small, iPod-like devices.

In my view, though, nothing will replace the book for sheer convenience : you don’t have to plug it in, replace batteries, or search for a WiFi connection. But magazines are less convenient, increasingly costly, and many are migrating online, if only to bolster the stats of their print versions. This is not a Road to Damascus conversion.

Developing a built-for-purpose, online-only, native magazine industry is a market waiting to happen, if only blog network owners can wake up and smell the burning newsprint.

It’s not so much about technology, but user interface design and old-fashioned publishing skills.