Can multiplatform audiences transform the fortunes of magazines?
With magazines touting multiplatform audiences as the new standard to sceptical advertisers and agencies Mumbrella looks at what multiplatform audiences actually are, how they are being measured, and the potential pitfalls in the methodology, in the first of a two-part series supported by Magazine Networks.
Australia’s three major magazine publishers caused controversy last December when they withdrew from the Audited Media Association of Australia’s (AMAA) circulation audit, effectively killing circulation as a metric for major consumer magazines.
The move was widely interpreted as a ploy by publishers to limit transparency, particularly because the circulation of Australian consumer magazines had been in decline, almost across the board, for years. That decline has been accompanied by an even greater drop in advertiser dollars.
Martin Orliac, GM of digital agency Annalect, sums up the feeling around the market saying the move “certainly doesn’t inspire confidence.”
“As clients are demanding more transparency, publications resisting audited measurements will ultimately end up losing even more clientele, thus further reducing readership and circulation,” he predicts.
Magazine Networks was formed in 1995, previously known as The Association of Magazine Publishers of Australia (MPA) and represents Australian publishers of consumer, cover-priced and nationally distributed magazines. Click here for more information.
Well you learn something new every day … “Traditionally readership was calculated by multiplying a publication’s total circulation by the average number of people who read each copy.”
I think you will find that readership was based on a survey of who read recent copies of a title. Then the AMAA circulation data was added to the mix to calculate the Readers per Copy (RPC). The process was (to the best of my knowledge) never the other way around. I can’t see how you would ask … how many copies of Title X do you have in this house and how many people read it … and get any sort of usable answer.
I still think that circulation has an important ‘secondary’ role in estimating likely readership for small titles that simply don’t get read enough in the Morgan or EMMA samples to be reported. If you lumped all the small/niche titles readership together into a group, then lumped al their circulations together you could generate an ‘average RPC’ which could then be applied back to each title’s circulation. You probably wouldn’t get any demos but at least you’d have a reasonable estimate of total readers.
Some issues here:
1. You seem to be trying to ‘bullshit a gaggle of bullshitters here. The article feels like an echo chamber of magazine people pushing a line of logic which doesn’t add up. Even if they believe it, many media buyers wouldn’t. OK, it’s a content marketing piece. Not an excuse.
2. Break these arguments down and you have nothing that you didn’t have before, except spin (bad spin). Magazines aren’t something amazing and new if you attempt to blur the engagement metric first by suddenly running an argument that circulation figures are misleading everyone somehow. Too far. They aren’t everything but this group is trying way too hard to blot out any meaning or history for this metric. Why are they trying so hard? Because you think there is too much emphasis on print? You make all your money there and you don’t have digital offerings that can replace that money. Not yet anyway.
3. Pretending circulation doesn’t exist and then either adding digital engagements (which aren’t comparable to a print engagement) and relying only on readership, without a central engagement measure – who actually bought a magazine – is non-sensical. These are not logical or cohesive arguments. The engagements between a paying reader, a pass on reader, someone who recognises a brand or mistakes one and never actually read, a digital reader, bots who look like readers, 15 second bounces and so on, are all very very different. You can’t get away with saying ‘ hey, look into my eyes, there’s all this extra engagement you didn’t see before….no really….forget that silly old circulation metric, it was misleading’. That is taking media buyers for simpletons.
3. I very strongly suspect that Magazine Networks has invested a lot more in Mumbrella, a digital only play, than B&T or Ad News. If we combine their print and online offerings, it would be a quite significant, magazine-led engagement. How much did Magazine Networks spend with the two industry magazine based groups versus the digital only player?. Tell us please. And if you don’t, I for one will assume you spent next to nothing because you are embarrassed to admit you don’t actually support print, either consciously or sub consciously. There is something very wrong here. An association that doesn’t believe in its own product enough to use it. You seem lost.
4. Don’t come out next week and say you have an amazing additional audience in digital and expect people to turn around and either believe you, or help you monetise it, if they somehow fall for that. It’s a crazy idea. Most consumer magazines have done a woeful job of digital and continue to do so. Your engagement online is peripheral to your business as things stand , but you somehow think people will buy that it is isn’t. How do we know that?. Because you make about 85% of your revenue in print. You might be impressed with your digital numbers but others aren’t. Not so far anyway and it’s not, as you seem to be arguing, because no one noticed, because you were doing circulation audits and that somehow distracted everyone.
5. OK, it’s a content marketing peice, but this article largely has an upside for everything that is bad about how magazines have managed digital disruption, but no rational objections from industry figures who would easily take each of these arguments apart bit by bit. Some examples:
* see your first comment: someone doesn’t even know how magazines have traditionally measured pass on . That’s not very credible if you’re attempting to argue away that one of your major historical metrics is irrelevant now.
* most of these publishers make between 10 and 25% on their digital plays per brand. Let’s says 18%. So 82% of their money comes from print. Why then are we seeking to take the emphasis off print? The money isn’t going to flow in digital. You don’t have the numbers or the utility or the credibility (largely so far anyway).
* “an antiquated metric” is a convenient phrase. Magazines aren’t TV. They aren’t digital. They are magazines. Paid circulation isn’t everything, but that you run from it like it’s a stinking rotting carcass? What do you think people think you think? You’re over correcting way too much. It’s very obvious
* “we’ve always sold on audience” – OK, why is there a problem that calls for you to pay someone to interview you for money and drop one of your major historical metrics and the only one that is absolutely clear? Did you do it badly before and now you’ve grown up? Or are media buyers idiots and you need to lead them to this obvious long time fact?
* 50,000 readers in print and digital and I’m not confident they are the same? Even if they’re exactly the same the engagement is wildly different and engagement and needs to be treated differently. It feels like some people interviewed don’t even understand digital.
And so on
I’m sorry to be so critical but magazines are a brilliant medium, and in the digital age, managed correctly, you can’t match their form of engagement. They can be a stand out play now. But few argue the real merits of the medium or play to them.
No, I would not like to be a consumer publisher and you clearly have some very difficult issues to overcome. For one thing, large chunks of your portfolios now have only one difference between what is on the web for free. Their words and pictures are on paper. Add that to distributing the paper and these particular titles are finished. That’s very hard after so many years. But some parts of digital disruption you can’t fight. Map that out, do someting about it and move on.
Magazines differentiation is via a combination of form, function AND CONTENT. It needs to be a unique mix that uses the physical utility with great content. See Monocle, for a pretty good example.
That won’t solve a lot of consumer publisher problems today I know. But coming out with this pilava won’t either. It just makes things worse. You don’t back your own medium and you are attempting to spin your way out it and doing that badly.
Magazine brands are very emotive and powerful still. If we treat them right and love them for what they are, they can succeed digitally as well….eventually, or in some other way. Mumbrella, which is a media group which monetizes mainly via events, had its origins in magazine brands (B&T mostly). They took that and did something very smart digitally with it.
Bauer is taking all their women’s audiences and starting to treat them digitally, not as their magazine readers. They are creating different online brands which include mashing beauty directories into their offerings and things like that. Pacific is doing a little of this but probably not enough.
There are lots of things you are trying and should be trying. This piece of content marketing isn’t one them.
And the 2017 award for longest, rambling and most incomprehensible, Mumbrella comment goes to…
You don’t need to buy a new TV every time you watch a programme. Understanding how many copies are sold is an important part of evaluation.
@Jeremy Brilliant !