ABCs: Less than 20 magazines remain in audit following withdrawal of major publishers

If people read more, they would know the correct term would be “fewer than twenty magazines”… sigh

I thought I’d lob my thoughts in.

I find it sad that so few titles are now not audited. I understand the financial pressures. I understand (and agree) that readership and not circulation should have primacy.

But I also think that the days of solus metrics have had it.

Even though readership is the metric of audience planning that doesn’t mean that circulation has no place.

Take a desirable magazine like Frankie that gets a readership of around 350,000 off around 50,000 copies. Each copy is passed-on a further six times. Circulation doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of capturing pass-on readers. Those pass-on readers may have less ‘value’ than the purchaser, but good ads tend to get noticed when put in front of even a casual reader.

Consider a more niche magazine like Australian Golf Digest. It has about 70,000 readers. That is about 0.3% of the reading population. And there are even more niche titles out there. So if you surveyed (say) 100,000 people in a year, you’d find around 300 who had read AGD. As a stand-alone sample size that is OK, mainly because we know that around 99,700 people said they DIDN’T read it. The trouble is the readership estimates can get ‘bouncy’ or ‘noisy’. Bride To Be is around half AGDs size, Are the changes real or sample size induced?

Well this is where audited circulation has a KEY role. While Readers-Per-Copy (RPC) can be a difficult (and misleading) metric, especially for single titles, it can still be used as a calibration tool.

RPC often gets a bum rap, largely because many people think that just because circulation goes up, readership should. Or vice versa. Most compare a quarterly circulation figure to an annual readership figure, which only further muddies the waters.

But consider a new magazine that launches to a relatively small sales figure. People are trialling it. Those that like it are likely to pass it on to their friends and recommend having a read of it. Let’s say half pass a copy on, and half of those that receive it like it, and subscribe or buy the next issue rather than relying on their friends largesse. In this simple example, circulation would be up +25% and readership unchanged. The figures can go the other way, especially when the purse strings have to be tightened when more copies are bought and shared – circulation down but readership unchanged. Prima facie they are counter-intuitive. That’s the problem dealing with real people.

And there are certain classes of publications where circulation is essential in order to trade in advertising. Among them are community and regional newspapers. Consider a small country town with a population of say 25,000, or even the Southern Highlands where I live that has around 50,000 people. Readership samples are around 0.25% of the around 20m people of reading age. So in my neck of the woods you’d have a sample of around 125, so a small country town is more likely to be in the dozens. Even if everyone of them read the local paper, you would still have a marginal sample size. But if you looked at the small country towns, where each has a single newspaper and people either read it or don’t and grouped them together then you would get a reasonable sample size and active readers, from which you can derive the RPC across this group of towns. In fact you may even be able to estimate readership with a reasonable degree of confidence based solely on the circulation! Fortunately, this type of thinking is already being used in Australia.

Anyway, just my thoughts. Shoot holes in them if you’d like to.

Cheers.

An ABC audit costs next to nothing. Which makes the motivation of all these publishers what exactly? Why won’t they spend a few hundred dollars each year to provide the paid circulation figures of their print magazines to their clients? Why is this an irrelevant figure not needed any more? Why are they happy to see our only industry audit body, the AMAA, brought to its knees by their collective (and suspiciously contiguous) withdrawal?

The answer is that paid circulation is a very relevant print media engagement figure, easy to provide and it’s not being providing because these publishers are into smoke and mirrors and bullshitting their clients. They don’t want anyone to measure them properly.

ABC is maybe a more relevant engagement figure than readership. As Mr Grono says, in this day and age, less data points for triangulation of media performance, especially when it is so cheap to provide, is not the thing to be doing.

Paid circulation audits (ABC) are at least ‘real’. You can’t fake a paid circulation receipt (well, as some of us remember, you actually can and, not surprisingly, many of these publishers who have now pulled out of once did fake their ABC audits using various commercial tricks).

Readership is a highly variable and difficult figure arrived at via perception mainly. It is not one to one like ABC or well done digital. It is done via surveys and panels and subject to lots of bias and methodology error. Effectively it is not a very trustworthy figure and any backup you can get for it is worth getting.

We once had a B2B publication (controlled circulation) which had ‘Money’ in its title. It had a circulation of only 8,000, yet we were being reported in the Roy Morgan readership figures at the time as the number 1 consumer Money title, with a readership somewhere North of 60,000 – which was completely ridiculous for a controlled circulation title which went to financial planners only. We were being mixed up by the public (and Roy Morgan) .Im sure it’s better now, but really, how much better if you can stuff things up this badly?

With no ABC figures anymore, what is the baseline for any of these magazines? Is a pass-on reader , who hasn’t paid for a magazine, going to engage at the same level as some one who actually pays for the magazine. I doubt it. Again, the ABC figure has important uses – for those of us who understand how to understand magazine engagement.

An ABC audit is a very good trend check for readership figures. So again. Why get rid of it?

These publishers are hoping to blind their clients with wistful fluff. Perception. Combo figures. Look into my eyes….what do you see now. More readership! More engagement. More bullshit.

Worse, they want to try to combine their digital engagements somehow with their print engagements and come up with some sort of overall figure or measurement that feels bit more impressive for their clients. Even more bullshit.

Media buyers surely aren’t this stupid. Digital impressions on magazine websites are not something you can combine with print readership or print sales figures. How do you say that a page view or impression or whatever, which might be less than a few seconds, or may not have even been viewed in reality, relates to someone spending time flipping a magazine in any meaningful way in a combined figure? Please tell me?

If someone actually pays for a magazine, you’re going to be pretty sure they are going to read most of it. And engage pretty strongly. This is a vital gauge of a very deep engagement that is not reproducible in any way online. It is in clear media space. Even if your paid circs are dropping you have something no one else has. But what are these guys doing. Running a mile from it. They are running from one of the only USPs magazines really do have against the volume and light speed engagements on digital devices.

Australian consumer magazine publishing is the laughing stock of world magazine publishing. Ask someone like Tyler Brule – the founder of Monocle. It’s sad.

No one is saying magazine publishing doesn’t need some help and needs to take some drastic action in places. But these measures are embarrassing and crazy.

The other thing that it is not a very good look and goes to the dogdy air of the whole consumer magazine scene now is that it looks like all these major publishers went to the pub and cooked this up. Yep, colluded. I said it. Allegedly if you like. Who cares. Even if they didn’t it looks like they did and that’s more embarrassing mud that sticks to print media. We don’t need it.

Oh no, they’ll say to that allegation. It happened separately and we all came to the decision independently. Sure.

Magazines are still a great media spend. Print is an engagement experience that is nothing at all like digital, whether it’s a digital only site or a digital site of a magazine brand. Look at Monocle, The Atlantic, The Economist, Frankie, Monster Children and a sway of others being done by people who are adapting the medium to its strengths. They all work in print and with online. But none of them do this crap. They wouldn’t even dream of being so stupid.

Media buyers should place massive pressure on these companies to reverse their decisions and their attitude towards their clients. It is a very slippery slope. God knows Google and Facebook aren’t any better.

These magazine companies had a big opportunity to go the other way amid Google and Facebook behaving so badly. But no. They decided to join them in the game of gaming clients about engagement with media.

Fake the news. Fake the media engagement (or at least cloud it right up). What do you get? Fake media. Donald Trump couldn’t have managed this sideshow better.