From "Most Effective Digital Mag Brands" to "7 Magazine Websites That Suck"

Media research firm Affinity LLC has issued its latest American Magazine Study, which ranks 170 digital magazine brands on attributes ranging from "Most Trusted" to "Most Useful" and "Most Entertaining."

Rankings are based on the percent of a magazine's digital audience that cites the brand as their preferred source of information for each of the attributes measured, while digital readers include a magazine's Website and social network visitors, electronic subscribers, and consumers accessing a magazine's content through mobile devices.

According to Affinity, top performers include:

Most Trusted: WebMD the Magazine

Most Entertaining: Maxim

Most Useful: Cooking Light

Most Innovative: Dwell

Most Believable: Guideposts

Most Topical: The Atlantic

Most Authoritative: The Economist

Most Interesting: Smithsonian

Most Enjoyable: Playboy (go figure)

For Affinity's full release, click here.

Meanwhile, anonymous blogger Dead Tree Edition digs into a recent "digital IQ" ranking of 87 consumer magazine websites from digital think tank L2 that named TIME as the only "Genius" among the bunch. Dead Tree highlights the dunces of the bunch (by L2 standards), starting with inTouch Weekly, which ranks dead last. "I'm no web designer (in case you hadn't noticed), but the inTouch site does have a late 1990s "Guess what? We're now on the Internet!" look to it," writes Dead Tree.

Other sites that don't fare well: Town & Country ("is anybody home?); Men's Journal ("no daily blog") and Star ("the last to know.")

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