ABCs: Less than 20 magazines remain in audit following withdrawal of major publishers
Less than 20 magazines remain in the Audited Media Association of Australia’s (AMAA) magazine circulation audit following the departure of the three main consumer publishers at the end of last year.
The audited figures for the six months ended December 2016 have been released today, the first since Bauer Media, News Corp’s NewsLifeMedia and Pacific Magazines pulled out of the audit late last year.
David Angell, general manager and head of media at TrinityP3 has labelled the move a “negative step” for the industry.
Angell: Pulling out of audit will only cause more doubt
“It’s a shame that, as an industry, they’ve taken this negative step,” he said.
“Whilst it’s not perfect, there is still nothing as transparent as independent circulation and by pulling out, the publishers make themselves look defensive and self-serving and a bit desperate.
“Clearly, if print circulation wasn’t in decline it would be very hard to imagine them pulling out,” he added.
Angell said media agencies need to be “combining different sorts of data in making decisions”, however, circulation is “an important metic because print sales still form a significant part of what advertisers are buying into”.
“Ideally circulation should be used with readership and all sorts of other data to enable media buyers to make decisions.
“So by removing circulation entirely the publishers have simply made it hard to properly gauge, and at the same time they’ve caused a lot of people to take a very cynical view as to why they’ve done it.
“If they’ve done it to increase advertising revenue I don’t think it’s going to work. It’s certainly going to make mastheads even more challenging to buy with confidence,” he added.
Angell said the decision to pull out of the audit was going to “cause more doubt”.
“It’s going to cause more question marks around whether or not media agencies should buy into advertising platforms,” he said.
However, media buyers appear unconcerned, saying the move wasn’t a surprise.
Mike Wilson, Havas Media Australia CEO, told Mumbrella: “I would hope that most clients recognise that this change is quite significant and therefore they will expect a certain amount of rigour from their agencies in evaluating their investment decisions in the magazine category.”
Wilson: It’s not surprising that in a declining category the decision was made not to reveal standard data
On the decision by the major publishers to pull out of the audit, Wilson said: “Some of the facts show that the magazine category overall has been hit quite hard in recent times, and the fact that the major players now don’t participate in a circulation audit sends some worrying signals about their motives making that decision.
“It is not surprising that in a category that seems to be in decline, particularly against core demographics, that the decision was made not to reveal standard data which is something we all looked at previously. It’s not surprising then the creeping in of a little bit of suspicion or caution. Having said that, there are other metrics available.”
Danny Bass, CEO at IPG Mediabrands, was similarly not surprised.
Bass: The reality is verification as we and clients knew it has changed
“It’s no surprise and fully understandable. To think that the traditional methodology we used to hold any media to account to is still valid today is, at best, naïve,” he said.
“We live in an era where independent third-party verification will never be as it once was. This poses a massive challenge to all who operate across the media ecosystem but it’s now a reality.
“We can pontificate as much much as we want to but the reality is that verification as we and our clients knew it has changed is never coming back. The issues surrounding Google and Facebook have been well documented but has it changed spend patterns ? Not one bit, for now.”
Bass said the way the industry has moved forward has put the onus on media agencies to be the independent arbiter.
“As such the role of a media agency to be an independent arbiter on media placement has never been more important than it is today,” he said.
“Whether this decision will prove to be a good thing for the magazine industry, only time will tell but the challenges they face today will be the same for all media over time.”
For Mark Coad, CEO at PHD Australia, readership metrics are preferable over circulation figures.
Coad: “We’re more interested in how many people have actually engaged or read it”
“We’re more interested in how many people have actually engaged or read it,” he said.
“As long as there’s a third-party endorsement while their audiences remain in play, I don’t have a major issue with it. If I was given the choice over circulation and readership, it would definitely be readership.”
According to the figures, Morrison Media’s Frankie saw its circulation slide by 5.4%, year-on-year, from 53,053 copies of the bi-monthly magazine sold on average in 2015 to 50,167.
Morry Schwartz’s The Monthly bucked declining trends, posting year-on-year circulation growth of 8.5%, selling on average 31,544 copies a month in the final half of 2016, up from the 29,080 sold on average a month at the end of 2015.
Fortnightly magazine The Big Issue saw its circulation drop by 0.60% from 29,064 at the end of 2015 to 28,879.
AFL Media’s AFL Record saw its circulation slip by 5.10% from an average of 26,314 copies a week in the final six months of 2015 to 24,968 in the same period last year.
Miranda Ward worked for Mumbrella from 2013 to 2017, eventually becoming deputy editor. Miranda joined Mumbrella in September 2013 from Sky News.
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If people read more, they would know the correct term would be “fewer than twenty magazines”… sigh
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This post is riddled with spelling and grammatical errors..
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I thought I’d lob my thoughts in.
I find it sad that so few titles are now not audited. I understand the financial pressures. I understand (and agree) that readership and not circulation should have primacy.
But I also think that the days of solus metrics have had it.
Even though readership is the metric of audience planning that doesn’t mean that circulation has no place.
Take a desirable magazine like Frankie that gets a readership of around 350,000 off around 50,000 copies. Each copy is passed-on a further six times. Circulation doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of capturing pass-on readers. Those pass-on readers may have less ‘value’ than the purchaser, but good ads tend to get noticed when put in front of even a casual reader.
Consider a more niche magazine like Australian Golf Digest. It has about 70,000 readers. That is about 0.3% of the reading population. And there are even more niche titles out there. So if you surveyed (say) 100,000 people in a year, you’d find around 300 who had read AGD. As a stand-alone sample size that is OK, mainly because we know that around 99,700 people said they DIDN’T read it. The trouble is the readership estimates can get ‘bouncy’ or ‘noisy’. Bride To Be is around half AGDs size, Are the changes real or sample size induced?
Well this is where audited circulation has a KEY role. While Readers-Per-Copy (RPC) can be a difficult (and misleading) metric, especially for single titles, it can still be used as a calibration tool.
RPC often gets a bum rap, largely because many people think that just because circulation goes up, readership should. Or vice versa. Most compare a quarterly circulation figure to an annual readership figure, which only further muddies the waters.
But consider a new magazine that launches to a relatively small sales figure. People are trialling it. Those that like it are likely to pass it on to their friends and recommend having a read of it. Let’s say half pass a copy on, and half of those that receive it like it, and subscribe or buy the next issue rather than relying on their friends largesse. In this simple example, circulation would be up +25% and readership unchanged. The figures can go the other way, especially when the purse strings have to be tightened when more copies are bought and shared – circulation down but readership unchanged. Prima facie they are counter-intuitive. That’s the problem dealing with real people.
And there are certain classes of publications where circulation is essential in order to trade in advertising. Among them are community and regional newspapers. Consider a small country town with a population of say 25,000, or even the Southern Highlands where I live that has around 50,000 people. Readership samples are around 0.25% of the around 20m people of reading age. So in my neck of the woods you’d have a sample of around 125, so a small country town is more likely to be in the dozens. Even if everyone of them read the local paper, you would still have a marginal sample size. But if you looked at the small country towns, where each has a single newspaper and people either read it or don’t and grouped them together then you would get a reasonable sample size and active readers, from which you can derive the RPC across this group of towns. In fact you may even be able to estimate readership with a reasonable degree of confidence based solely on the circulation! Fortunately, this type of thinking is already being used in Australia.
Anyway, just my thoughts. Shoot holes in them if you’d like to.
Cheers.
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An ABC audit costs next to nothing. Which makes the motivation of all these publishers what exactly? Why won’t they spend a few hundred dollars each year to provide the paid circulation figures of their print magazines to their clients? Why is this an irrelevant figure not needed any more? Why are they happy to see our only industry audit body, the AMAA, brought to its knees by their collective (and suspiciously contiguous) withdrawal?
The answer is that paid circulation is a very relevant print media engagement figure, easy to provide and it’s not being providing because these publishers are into smoke and mirrors and bullshitting their clients. They don’t want anyone to measure them properly.
ABC is maybe a more relevant engagement figure than readership. As Mr Grono says, in this day and age, less data points for triangulation of media performance, especially when it is so cheap to provide, is not the thing to be doing.
Paid circulation audits (ABC) are at least ‘real’. You can’t fake a paid circulation receipt (well, as some of us remember, you actually can and, not surprisingly, many of these publishers who have now pulled out of once did fake their ABC audits using various commercial tricks).
Readership is a highly variable and difficult figure arrived at via perception mainly. It is not one to one like ABC or well done digital. It is done via surveys and panels and subject to lots of bias and methodology error. Effectively it is not a very trustworthy figure and any backup you can get for it is worth getting.
We once had a B2B publication (controlled circulation) which had ‘Money’ in its title. It had a circulation of only 8,000, yet we were being reported in the Roy Morgan readership figures at the time as the number 1 consumer Money title, with a readership somewhere North of 60,000 – which was completely ridiculous for a controlled circulation title which went to financial planners only. We were being mixed up by the public (and Roy Morgan) .Im sure it’s better now, but really, how much better if you can stuff things up this badly?
With no ABC figures anymore, what is the baseline for any of these magazines? Is a pass-on reader , who hasn’t paid for a magazine, going to engage at the same level as some one who actually pays for the magazine. I doubt it. Again, the ABC figure has important uses – for those of us who understand how to understand magazine engagement.
An ABC audit is a very good trend check for readership figures. So again. Why get rid of it?
These publishers are hoping to blind their clients with wistful fluff. Perception. Combo figures. Look into my eyes….what do you see now. More readership! More engagement. More bullshit.
Worse, they want to try to combine their digital engagements somehow with their print engagements and come up with some sort of overall figure or measurement that feels bit more impressive for their clients. Even more bullshit.
Media buyers surely aren’t this stupid. Digital impressions on magazine websites are not something you can combine with print readership or print sales figures. How do you say that a page view or impression or whatever, which might be less than a few seconds, or may not have even been viewed in reality, relates to someone spending time flipping a magazine in any meaningful way in a combined figure? Please tell me?
If someone actually pays for a magazine, you’re going to be pretty sure they are going to read most of it. And engage pretty strongly. This is a vital gauge of a very deep engagement that is not reproducible in any way online. It is in clear media space. Even if your paid circs are dropping you have something no one else has. But what are these guys doing. Running a mile from it. They are running from one of the only USPs magazines really do have against the volume and light speed engagements on digital devices.
Australian consumer magazine publishing is the laughing stock of world magazine publishing. Ask someone like Tyler Brule – the founder of Monocle. It’s sad.
No one is saying magazine publishing doesn’t need some help and needs to take some drastic action in places. But these measures are embarrassing and crazy.
The other thing that it is not a very good look and goes to the dogdy air of the whole consumer magazine scene now is that it looks like all these major publishers went to the pub and cooked this up. Yep, colluded. I said it. Allegedly if you like. Who cares. Even if they didn’t it looks like they did and that’s more embarrassing mud that sticks to print media. We don’t need it.
Oh no, they’ll say to that allegation. It happened separately and we all came to the decision independently. Sure.
Magazines are still a great media spend. Print is an engagement experience that is nothing at all like digital, whether it’s a digital only site or a digital site of a magazine brand. Look at Monocle, The Atlantic, The Economist, Frankie, Monster Children and a sway of others being done by people who are adapting the medium to its strengths. They all work in print and with online. But none of them do this crap. They wouldn’t even dream of being so stupid.
Media buyers should place massive pressure on these companies to reverse their decisions and their attitude towards their clients. It is a very slippery slope. God knows Google and Facebook aren’t any better.
These magazine companies had a big opportunity to go the other way amid Google and Facebook behaving so badly. But no. They decided to join them in the game of gaming clients about engagement with media.
Fake the news. Fake the media engagement (or at least cloud it right up). What do you get? Fake media. Donald Trump couldn’t have managed this sideshow better.
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