Online on the up; disastrous decline for magazine ad spend

Just to be up front I work at Nielsen Online and I just thought I should correct this post by pointing out that the study in question actually did include both online and telephone surveys.

A national sample of both Internet users and non-users was captured via the telephone methodology mentioned, mainly for purposes of attaining the Internet participation rate. In addition, the online methodology captured a national sample of Internet users which comprises the bulk of Internet related data (amongst Internet users).

This section of the report was focused on showing the user behaviour of Internet users for sure but it did not ignore non Internet users.

Stuart Pike
Director of Industry Solutions
Nielsen Online

Hi Tim.

I’m glad you added the comments about the methodology being “open to challenge”. It sure is odd that when you conduct the survey online that online comes out on top – NOT!

Given that around 20%+ of Australians do not access the Internet in any month, we have 16.1 hours from 80% of the population and zero from the other = leaving us with 12.9 hours – the same as TV.

If you did a survey of media usage among the 20% who don’t use the internet – online would come in at zero – now wouldn’t THAT be a headline! This is not to say that for data that is NOT correlated to internet usage that their data base is no good – it’s just that no-one should use it for metrics auto-correlated to internet usage – like media consumption!

Mind you, there is a point of comparison that we can glean from this report to start to quantify how off the data is. If you combine the OzTAM and RegTAM data (off a household base of over 99% of the Australian population excluding the remote areas of Australia) you get average daily use of 193 minutes a day. That is 22.5 hrs a week from an “All People” base panel, compared to the 12.9 hrs reported above. That is, TV is under-reported by a little over 40% … and I wonder which medium gains the most?

JG,

I don’t want to get into an argument about good or bad methodologies but I do want to correct some assumptions that people continue to make about this report.

Yes the particular chart that the article refers to is just internet users – we have never tried to disguise that fact nor present these figures as absolutes as the entire report is all about internet use. Where it is not biased is that we ask for recall data on all media and all media suffer accordingly not just TV. It’s apples versus apples on that basis and the trends over the past 11 years are pretty distinct for most media.

Why did we just talk about internet users? Well it’s not that the non internet users aren’t important it’s just that the report about internet usage and what internet users are doing. Non users are treated like a non ratings period and ignored. Basically we are focusing our attention on the meatiest parts of the discussion that are most relevant to the point of the report (as explained above).

Interestingly enough the report itself does do a comparison of internet users with non users it just wasn’t chosen by anyone to write an article in the press. And before you ask the answer is yes we do include achart that shows internet use as zero versus large numbers for other media for non internet users.

I hope this clarifies what this report does and, perhaps more importantly, does not try to say.

Regards,

Stuart Pike
Director of Industry Solutions
Nielsen Online

JG – any one can skew figures. The 20% of the population that are not online are most likely over 60yrs old.

Let’s look at people under 30yrs then – their internet usage would be WAY higher with TV viewing much lower. (I frequently hear under 30’s saying – TV? Who watches TV any more).

These results are averages.

And guess what else… most companies are now doing their own product research… wait for it… OMG – ONLY ONLINE! God help them! LOL.

So internet is up and radio is down. How about Radio consumed via the internet? Or TV consumed by the internet? Etc. Get my point?

I will spell it out. TV declined by 0.4 of an hour. Video consumption via the internet went up by 2.5 hours. So a net gain of 2.1 hours.

Hooray traditional media is not dead, it is on the up, due to this new fangled interweb distribution channel.

Well all that print media nonsense sounds like a plan..NOT…you gotta laugh when print media pulls out their bludderbuss shaking as they take aim at the net, massaging their snake oil into their old bones argument thinking we’ll be bamboozled, (guys the net walks and talks print doesn’t or haven’t you clocked that yet) you could go on about why we don’t look at print these days, we all know why the net’s a preferred option, its exciting, prints fallen asleep at the wheel and it knows it, but wont say it publicly, look at the sales figures, every year it declines, if you want print to survive raise the budgets hire people who have a vision and understand the medium and willing to take risks, and not some pretty 20 something mentality that don’t understand print anyway.! your hiring the very people (figuratively speaking) who are partly responsible for its demise, they don’t get print.! they sure as hell aren’t buying it, their on the net as soon as they leave the building.

make print truly inspirational, make me want you and I’ll buy it.! but thats NOT what’s happening is it.! you change a masthead and think yeah we’re saved, but as you open it its the same, and it dies AGAIN and again, repeat ad nauseam, which proves nothing, a false fallacy, as for TV farrrrrr get it.