News Ltd now has sectional readership data, but what will it show?
News Ltd’s industry newsletter, NewsSpace carries an intriguing piece of information today.
The newspaper publisher has created what it claims is “Australia’s first sectional readership study”. According to the announcement:
“The research is designed to provide you with a greater understanding of how our audience connects with the content they read in our national newspaper sections.
“The first release includes News, Sports, Business, body+soul, TV Guide, Escape and Your Money, and will be available for agencies and clients later in May 2010.”
What makes it intriguing is why a newspaper publisher should make the move when the general view is that current readership numbers are much higher than sectional readership would be.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who stands outside my newsagent on a Saturday morning pulling section from section out of the newspaper and feeling guilty about dropping them straight in the bin.
Of course the right 20,000 people reading the IT section of the Australian is a valuable audience to the right advertiser, but it’s still a very different conversation to the one where the metric is an overall readership figure based on the Roy Morgan Research numbers.
Still, on the face of it, this is a good move for transparency.
But what worries me slightly is that an initiative carried out by a single publisher (and no details have yet been gvien of the methodology) carries far less weight than that of an industry currency.
And given that News Ltd has been the main driving force behind Newspaper Works’ attempt to replace Roy Morgan with a new currency, it’s a worrying hint that the new system – for which tendering is under way – won’t include sectional readership.
So far there’s been no straight answer either way from Newspaper Works, but why would News Ltd do this project if it’s about to be duplicated?
For what it’s worth, the top line findings from News Ltd includes the calculation that the average reader spends 43 minutes a day reading News Ltd’s metro newspapers, increasing to 57 minutes on Saturday and 62 minutes on Sunday.
Where it will get interesting though is in the details. For those in agencies, be sure to ask for them.
Tim Burrowes
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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My prediction: “100.0 % of News Ltd newspaper readers read the paper from cover to cover, including all ads. Sometimes they read it twice! So stop worrying you agency ninnies!”
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But will they allow sectional subscriptions when the paywall comes up?
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what will be interesting is not what it shows (which you can have a decent guess at…) but what they choose to share. if they do choose to share all the data then the transparency alone will give them a big competitive advantage over fairfax, and also allow them to compete more with magazines. if they only release edited highlights, it’ll probably be ignored …
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Credit where credits due, the market has been crying out for more visibility for years, presumably Fairfax refused to get involved, can only imagine why…
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Pity about the typos in the media release.
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There used to be plenty of sectional readership data, including the IT Section etc. It was stopped when News stopped liking the results.
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“I’m sure I’m not the only one who stands outside my newsagent on a Saturday morning pulling section from section out of the newspaper and feeling guilty about dropping them straight in the bin”
Funny, isn’t it? I always imagined I wasn’t the only who discarded most of the paper on the weekends APART from the various sections, particularly the lifestyle and entertainment liftouts. Some might argue that as newspaper circulation slowly declines in the face of online news services, good old supplements, magazines and other sections will be the main reason that people continue to buy hard-copy papers.
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Its ok Brett. I’m the one who goes around and takes the discarded copies from the bins and reads them at home.
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>Some might argue that as newspaper circulation slowly declines in the face of online news services, good old supplements, magazines and other sections will be the main reason that people continue to buy hard-copy papers.
It would be interesting to know who is subsidising whom when it comes to newspapers. While I personally discard the sports section, I have the impression that far more people buy the Sunday papers for sports coverage than for arts or literature.
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Sectional readership figures are available in many markets around the world. Interestingly in New Zealand the figures are released, and are (were) also available in reach and frequency allowing proper planning and scheduling. If you have colleagues in NZ ask them to send you over some data runs, it will look much the same for the NZ Herald as the Australian broadsheets. Fairfax may tell you different, but it is.
Where the data is unavailable, as in Australia, agencies do tend to apply a factor based (ideally on some research) normally on the sort of anecdotal information posted above.
I am not sure the release of sectional data will be the panacea agencies think it will be.
You can guess already what the data will look like. Almost all readers will look at the front (news) section and significantly less read the other sections. Business and sport seeing up to 50% – 60% falls from the host AIR. Despite the fact these deliver more targeted, engaged and hard to reach audiences all agencies end up doing is using the data to perpetuate the “first half of the front (news) section or nothing” approach to newspaper ad buying.
As you can imagine newspapers are seeking to move on from this. I think Newspaper Works should (they probably have) included sectional readership measures in their RFP but they should also attempt to measure the engagment each section engenders.
It may be true that we all flick through the front section for a couple of minutes however we often devote far more of our engaged and involved interaction with the paper reading the sections our (samples of one) posters above have mentioned. This type of reading and relationship that is engendered is worth far more to the advertiser than that devoted to the scanned (already 12 hours out of date) news section.
I don’t work for a newspaper and never have. I have however researched how people read newspapers and I am concerned that this will not be reflected in a simplistic sectional reading metric.
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It’s funny, at the recent NGen Media Landsacpe Forum and in many other places newspaper people (and others) are saying “we need to measure engagement not just eyeballs”. I’d love to see this – but first I’d love to see a commonly accepted metric for “engagement”. Is it time spent? Is it impact on intention to buy? Is it re-tweeting the brand name? How do you measure it? How would you compare engagement between media types? Will we be able to plan for a 70% reach, 40%”engagement” campaign? Can we buy a “cost per engagement” campaign on TV?
Reach and frequency is not the full story but it’s scientific, it makes sense, and it’s something all media can agree on. The industry needs a currency and “engagement” is just too fluffy. It seems like the latest buzz word people flap around without disclosing its true meaning, being…?
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Perhaps the engagement metric for papers is “not throwing sections in the bin”
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Australia’s first sectional readership study… really? I know we have for a long time wanted sectional readership within Roy Morgan, and that would then allow demographic profiling as well as reach and frequency analysis, but – apart from Panorama measuring non publisher specific sectional readership from launch – one of the publishers definitely released a study of sectional readership within their own stable of titles, many years ago. I feel like it was News Limited. Perhaps this has been a continuous study, and therefore is still the first? Any old timers’ memory better than mine?
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Every day I see many people at my office reading newspapers – at lunchtime or to take short mental breaks through the day. Howeer none of them reach for a paper version, it is all onscreen.
Providing sectional data for the paper versions is all well and good. How about even more focused data on online segmentation, by topic (ie In the entertainment section by medium or celebrity, in the Sports section by team or code and in the business section by industry segment or company) possibly linked to real audience demographics for logged in readers?
Sectional data is so 1980s.
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