Many magazines failed. The two big successes of the period were Life Magazine and the Reader's Digest.

VOA: special.2011.04.14

"I picked up a Reader's Digest, and there I read that for $100 million the World Health Organization had eradicated small pox."

VOA: standard.2010.08.02

At its peak in the 1970s, Reader's Digest boasted a circulation of 17 million in the United States alone, and its international editions sold millions more copies in many languages.

VOA: standard.2010.03.08

The Reader's Digest gives it to you in one look.

NPR: Songwriter Betty Comden

For three decades the Reader's Digest Association was able to keep its flagship magazine's more than 15 million subscribers by sending out 40 million subscribe-and-win sweepstakes solicitations a year.

FORBES: Old Dog, New Tricks

Perhaps the decline of Reader's Digest's fortunes was inevitable with the longer-term social and political influences of 60s counterculture, the failure of general interest magazines, the rise of global media targeted at specific niches and the advent of the internet.

CNN: Rise and fall of Reader's Digest