Don’t let declining numbers at traditional publications convince you that their influence is necessarily waning.
How many people read newspapers, magazines, and websites? And who are they? These have long been critical questions for advertising executives and communications professionals trying to reach the biggest or most appropriate audience. But while the circulation figures of international publications such as the New York Times, the Handelsblatt, and the Financial Times may appear to be impressively specific, authoritative, and objective – offering detailed data on incomes, spending patterns and education levels – they have never been as reliable as they appear to be. And in the age of the BlackBerry, Kindles, home computers, airline televisions, and other electronic news sources, the official numbers are becoming even less useful.
At this stage, it is safe to say that circulation is almost dead as a meaningful concept. To try to capture the new multi-media, multi-channel, multi-device reality, publishers and broadcasters are developing new metrics that offer a better reflection of their readership. CNN recently claimed leadership in each of the following categories: “Total TV and web consumers,” “TV/web multi-platform integrators,” “Total (online) usage minutes,” number of “video streams,” “Mobile web users,” “Mobile TV viewers,” “Audio podcasts,” and “Video podcasts.” Scarborough Research and the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) have joined forces with the Audit Bureau of Circulations to launch “Audience FAX,” which measures a newspaper’s weekly print readership, online readership, and the combined print and web readership. In June 2009, The Media Audit, a Houston, Texas-based syndicated media ratings service currently covering more than 80 metropolitan markets, released data looking at the top United States newspapers’ “reach” in their respective markets. The concept of “reach” combines unduplicated print and internet audiences. According to The Media Audit, the New Orleans’ Picayune Times and its companion site, nola.com, reach 83 per cent of their overall market.
The problem is that these next-generation metrics are still not yet broadly accepted in the US or anywhere else. “A procedure for measuring audience penetration levels for both printed and online newspapers that is both accurate and accepted by business advertisers has not yet been devised,” the Bundesverband Deutscher Zeitungsverleger (the Federation of German Newspaper Publishers) concluded in a 2008 report.
Circulation: myth and reality So what to do? Before answering this question, it is useful to start with some basic definitions. In the US and the United Kingdom, “paid circulation” is defined by the Audit Bureau of Circulations as the number of newspapers paid for by an individual reader or distributed via “specialized channels.” For example, as of March according to figures released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the circulation for the weekday New York Times was 1.039m. Of that group, 65 per cent receive the Times at home, 21 per cent bought it on newsstands, and 14 per cent is via “bulk sales.” Bulk sales are the copies newspaper groups sell for a nominal fee to airlines, hotels, gyms and restaurants (which may give them away for free). They are controversial, because the publisher need only haul more copies to the nearest airline terminal to boost circulation. Indeed, in the UK ABC is conducting a “forensic review” of bulk circulation claims by newspapers, and a number of UK titles have reportedly decided to eliminate bulk sales from their calculations of paid circulation, substantially reducing sales figures.