Publishers’ new readership metric shows big growth in audiences compared to old measure
The first set of data from the new readership metric Enhanced Media Metrics Australia (EMMA) has recorded a significant increase in the audience of many of Australia’s largest publishers compared with rival Roy Morgan Research.
EMMA – funded by Australia’s publishers – is a challenger to Morgan’s existing industry readership metric. EMMA provides readership data for print and digital platforms .
A comparison of the two by Mumbrella shows significant increases of between 25 per cent and 113 per cent in the estimated audiences of most mastheads belonging to publishers News Limited, Fairfax Media, Pacific Magazines and Bauer Media.
Under the EMMA metric, NSW mastheads The Sydney Morning Herald and The Daily Telegraph have a combined monthly print and online audience of 4.23m and 3.95m respectively. This is 27.7 per cent and 49.6 per cent more respectively than under rival metric Morgan.
Victorian mastheads The Age and The Herald Sun were 25.8 per cent and 30.0 per cent higher respectively, with EMMA recording an overall print and web audience of 3.02m and 3.92m for each.
National publications The Australian and The Australian Financial Review have some of the largest increases under the new metric. The Australian’s audience was last month measured at 2.97m compared with 1.8m under Morgan, an increase of 65 per cent. The Australian Financial Review has an audience of 1.13m compared with 608,000 under Morgan, an increase of 113 per cent.
Emma breaks down readership by print, web and also mobile and tablet. For the purposes of comparison with Morgan the comparison has only been made with print and web.
Click to enlarge
News Corp has championed the creation of the rival metric over the last four years. “Today marks an historic occasion for the media industry. For years, media companies and advertisers have been crying out for a truly accurate measurement of what people are actually consuming across all platforms,” said newly installed News Corp Australia CEO Julian Clarke, in a statement.
“The data gives unparalleled multi-platform readership and behavioural insights and offers our commercial partners more confidence in their decision making. Critically, it also allows for more granular audience targeting,” claimed Clarke.
Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood issued a statement noting that Fairfax’s national and metro mastheads reached 7.5 million Australians each month. “EMMA has shown what we have known for some time – that our readers are highly engaged and loyal to Fairfax mastheads, with many exclusively engaging with Fairfax across platforms,” said Hywood.
Australia’s top magazines had more mixed audience results with Bauer Media titles The Australian Women’s Weekly and Cosmopolitan 22.8 per cent and 17.8 per cent lower in audience under the EMMA metric.
Meanwhile Pacific Magazines’ New Idea was 65 per cent bigger according to EMMA, while Bauer Media publications Cosmopolitan and Cleo were 39.9 per cent and 24.8 per cent higher.
The company has not released data comparing the year-on-year changes within EMMA’s readership, meaning the market is unable to see if the metric suggests audiences are rising or falling overall. Simon Wake, Ipsos MediaCT’s managing director, told Mumbrella that the company was unable to provide comparisons until it had two years of data; at present it only has 18 months.
The average multiplier Emma places on most national newspapers of readership compared to circulation is 3.9 on weekday newspapers, 2.7 on Saturday papers and 2.4 on Sunday. In magazines the multiple is 6.0 for weekly magazines and 6.9 for monthly magazines.
The company also said it would be releasing data for individual sectional readership shortly.
UPDATE: Emma has this morning released the sectional data, tracking which sections of Australia’s newspapers are most read. Click here to read the full weekly sectional report.
Nic Christensen
I don’t see the point in breaking out tablet and mobile from web – they are devices for digital consumption, not mediums in themselves.
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Not surprised to see the SMH is now Australia’s most read newspaper across combined print/digital. You can just tell with the amount of shares there are on social media of Fairfax articles, plus the hundreds of reader comments that most of their articles generate. While News still dominates print, Fairfax’s big reach in digital reach puts it ahead overall. And even if these figures are exaggerated, the positioning of each masthead is likely to be accurate, otherwise News wouldn’t be championing EMMA so much.
I just didn’t think it would be possible for the News tabloids to generate big digital audiences. That type of content might be great for print but I don’t think it gels with digital audiences… as these figures show.
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‘EMMA – funded by Australia’s publishers…’ publishes a bunch of stats the publishers love.
Does anyone actually believe them, though? Sydney’s population is 4.5 million. 85% of them read the Herald and the Telly… *bullshit*
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Ex reader, do the words “independent audit” mean anything to you?
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I love a good conspiracy theory. They inevitably pop up when someone’s long held world view is challenged and they’re not comfortable with change.
Who would have thought that surveying people in as close to real time as possible, plus fusing actual online readership data, would increase readership figures vs a long, boring conversation held once a week while filling in a paper diary?
Oh yeah…anyone with rational thought.
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Deary me – does anyone actually believe this bulldust??
Good grief.
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@Ricki – singing from the publisher song book. If anything, the Morgan data would overstate newspaper readership.
These figures are extraordinary – nearly 4 readers per circulated copy of a weekday newspaper? Does that include online? With household sizes shrinking and workplaces dominated by people reading online?
And surely the combined print/online metric is fairly meaningless.
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@Anonymous
With a simple script running through a TOR browser I could deliver your site thousands of ‘readers’ per hour. With some serious servers and vpns I could make you the king of the internet.
Bloody, hell. I’m in the wrong business, think I’ll open an astroturf firm and help big content screw over adland more than it already does.
Also… up to 11 readers per copy???
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Stu…how exactly do you figure that asking someone a question about what they read up to 6 days after the fact, would overstate readership? Please enlighten me.
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Ricki, I remember exactly how many newspapers I read in the last 7 – none. Not that hard.
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Ricki – if it’s an everyday activity (like reading a newspaper), you are more likely to say that you read it 6 days ago, even if you didn’t. It favours well-known brands and frequently read mastheads (like The Herald Sun for example) at the expense of smaller ones.
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Oh sorry JD. I should have realised that your media consumption behaviour is a proxy for 23 million Australians regardless of who they are, what stage of life they’re in and where they live. My bad.
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Does Ricki have any interests to declare? She sounds quite well informed…
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I’m well informed because I’ve read the released information. I have previously worked for the newspaper industry but no longer. I have not seen any of the data prior to this release and have no vested interests. The industry of which I’m a part have been looking at this issue for years and I’ve had extensive experience with Morgan both as a user and a client.
My opinion is based on the data I’m looking at, same as everyone else, past experience with Morgan and the global credibility of Ipsos. Here’s an idea…perhaps the conspiracy theorists could also do some homework? I won’t hold my breath.
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It doesn’t raise questions when a new methodology, delayed for years, funded and designed by publishers, suddenly finding hundreds of thousands of new readers in a medium that is clearly in decline?
If only the publishers put as much effort into their product and business model as they do into shooting the messenger, they might be in better shape.
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@Ben, the markup supplied to browsers now frequently has a three level branch: normal browsers, mobile(phone) browsers and tablets. The explicit breakout helps people who do page design look at the metrics of which view predominates, and so decide which style issues to address. I know that phone/mobile view on tablet is a royal pain when you get badly sized images, and wasted layout because of a 640×480 tiny screen. Its quite different to view this stuff on a nexus 7 or iPad. And both are radically different to a PC/desktop browser in terms of back-end support for things like java, flash and javascript.
I know it might not make front-end sense, but I think it does make back-end sense to count it.
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