ABCs: Tele doubles SMH sales as Fairfax accuses News Limited of boosting giveaways
News Limited’s The Daily Telegraph now outsells its Fairfax Media rival the Sydney Morning Herald by two-to-one on weekdays, new numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulations today reveal.
The SMH saw its average circulation fall by 14.75% to 170,666 in the April to June quarter compared to the same period last year. The Tele fell by 1.36% to 350,059 in the ABCs.
The market will not be surprised to see dramatic falls across most Fairfax Media mastheads, as the publisher has been releasing additional monthly audience data which pointed in that direction. Fairfax argues that it has focused on retaining profitable copies while ditching those it costs money to circulate and print.
The biggest metro or national newspaper fall in the country came from Fairfax’s Sunday tabloid The Sun-Herald, which dropped 18.66% for the quarter to 346,960. Again this result had been telegraphed in Fairfax’s audience reports which saw the paper’s decline accelerate in June to 23%.
Mumbrella (and ad folks) – how reliable are the digital numbers?
We all know puffing takes place in print, the schools around my area all have thirty copies a day of the local rag lying around unread.
But what about online? It’s so much easier to fake. Hell, with the right scripting, a modified LOIC and a bit of TOR abuse, even a dummy like me could generate a few thousand “unique visits” per day.
Throw in the questionable auto-refresh and auto-start tactics of some and it all starts to look very wonky.
Do you trust the ABC’s digital stats?
We know that digital is unprofitable. So what they’re really saying is that the restructuring flagged yesterday by news is actually a funeral parade for newspaper businesses
@ Me, the data released by the ABC today represents the sales of audited magazines and newspapers across print and digital editions, and does not include website traffic. There are two new reports that detail the types of digital formats sold and separate reporting for mastheads that reveals the de-duplicated sales by channel and the total number of sales for a masthead. Visit the Resources area of http://www.auditbureau.org.au for further detail about what qualifies for ABC Print and Digital reporting.
Who is Brett Clegg fooling? He is giving the web site to print subscribers. So it is not growth at all. The Monday to Friday curc is his business base and it’s caving.
If anything is explosive it’s most likely the red ink supply in his finance department.
Me. You display a misunderstanding of the difference between ABC audited sales and readership data.
‘Sales’ represent the ‘copies’ out in the market that can potentially be read, whereas ‘readership’ includes copies that are free, passed-on etc and ‘read’. This counts the same in the print and the digital world
A lot of time was spent working out how in a digital world you could capture ‘a sale’. Basically, unless there is a financial transaction (e.g. a credit card payment, PayPal payment, iTunes payment etc) then it doesn’t count. Any free sign-ups are out.
Those ‘puffy’ copies you see in schools – which are broken out and reported separately by the way – must be supported by written evidence that someone at the school ordered the copies (on behalf of the kids – selling to schoolkids is not a good look). The same goes for the uni copies – the student must sign-up for and pay for their discount card. If they choose to pass the card to someone else, or even not use it, there was still an offer ‘at a price’ that was taken up and paid for It’s called pass-on. If they are still not used the remaining copies are removed from the total as a ‘returned copy’.
Before, anyone leaps in and says but they are not paying full price – neither does anyone who has a magazine subscription. That is how many markets work – buy more and we’ll reduce the price. ‘Full-price’ logic would say that a magazine subscriber was ‘worth less’ than a casual news-stand purchase. Rubbish. To extend that ‘logic’ would mean that every non-subscribing on-line consumer was worthless. Again rubbish.
We all know that online code can be easily gamed. Hence the digital watchdog to ensure that tricks like the ones you refer to are detected and that site is ineligible for reporting. Additionally click-stream analysis can detect things like multiple frames as the ping is at such a constant interval it is clearly not a human interaction. AP and AR are tricky issues – on SOME sites AR is essential (e.g. Cricinfo, AFL etc) but in the main it is not. AP is much harder to justify. Clear disclosure that traffic to sites that insist on AP is clearly needed.
But if you want to look for the MOST overstated metric in the market, you need look no further than ‘Monthly Unique Browsers’. Please tell me that you are not a publisher that sells based on Monthly UBs.
Another fail by Fairfax.
I like way John Grono leaps in on each of the occasions that someone mentions the dubious nature of newspaper and mag audits. John: I feel you, man.
What I think John also knows in his heart of hearts is that the numbers shed rapidly by Fairfax recently are just an elimination of expensive fake circulation. And that the amazing consistency of certain titles (let’s take The Oz, shall we), may in all probability be not a measure of the willingness of the public to part with $1.70.
One thing that I do not question is his implied doubts about online metrics. They are shabby and generally useless (if not tricked fakery) because they tell you nothing about the engagement of the audience – and therefore the likely value of any ad placement.
The Fairfax titles are all losing engagement very rapidly. Some are effectively dormant from a commercial (advertiser) view. News is down on its uppers in its monopoly markets and really is just hanging on in the Hun and Tele.
Rates will crash further. Then others of us will share the doom.