Newspaper readerships down, but data quality is questioned
While newspaper circulations may have held up in the figures released at the end of last week, six of Australia’s eight largest daily newspapers saw falls in readership numbers, according to data released today.
The worst-hit was The Australian, which saw an annual drop of 10.1% to an estimated average readership of 436,000 in 2008. Next was Fairfax’s The Age, which saw a fall of 7.8% to 707,000.
Despite the fact that advertisers would theoretically be more interested in buying according to how many eyeballs they are going to reach, The Roy Morgan figures tend to be given less weight by the industry than the Audit Bureau of Circulation figures, because the methodology has less transparency. The ABC attempts to verify how many actual copies of publications are distributed, while Roy Morgan’s estimates allow for copies to be passed along to other readers.
The two sets of info also often conflict. For instance, according to the ABC last week, the AFR was down 2.4% on weekdays. But Roy Morgan has its readership up by 3.8%. The same paper’s circulation was down by 2.5% on a Saturday, while its readership was up by an astonishing 22.8%, according to Roy Morgan today.
Since when do circulation and readership HAVE to head in the same direction? As circulation increases, pass-on drops off and the inverse applies. Think of it – if a publication had a circulation of 20m who could you pass it on to?
I agree that they TEND to move in the same direction, but there is a point where as circulation goes up the average readers per copy goes down, causing this apparent anomaly.
Hi JG,
I’ll buy the argument that it’s a statistical possibility. But the AFR’s Saturday readership suddenly leaping by nearly 23% when circulation is down. How likely is that to be correct?
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella