Measuring—and Defining—Audience

Amanda Knowles — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:25:00 GMT

“Audience” is a word you’ll hear a lot of in Vegas this week: how to deliver it, how to measure it and how to generate revenue from it. “Newspapers are evolving, and our audience metrics are evolving too,” Gary Meo, senior vice president of print and digital media services with Scarborough Research, told attendees during a morning session on trends in audience metrics. Put simply, audience means counting people, not papers; providing demographic information about readers; and putting newspapers on the same playing field as other forms of media, like TV and radio, which have been evaluated in terms of audience since their inception.

Meo provided an update on a major step in the audience direction: the Audience-FAX initiative, which incorporates circulation, readership and online measures into reports from the Audit Bureau of Circulations. In the upcoming Audience-FAX release for the six-month period ending this month, 187 papers are participating.

Seven newspapers in The New York Times Regional Media Group are Audience-FAX participants, according to Bill Truett, audience strategy director for the group. The initiative has provided credible audience and demo profiles that support these papers’ own server-based measures of online audience. The additional data also gives benchmarks for measuring local online market share and information that local advertisers trust, Truett said.

But the work of refining the practice of measuring online audience continues. Different audience figures —say, one from a panel-based measurement compared with one using a server-based approach—for the same Web site remain a point of contention, Meo acknowledged. “One of the problems is there’s a glut of measurements online,” he said.

Michael Harris, director of business intelligence for Cox Newspapers Inc., gave attendees an update on voluntary guidelines issued by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which represent an effort to create some consistency in online measurement—including standard definitions for everything from “unique user” to “page view.” Harris urged attendees to learn more about the guidelines, participate in the outreach IAB is organizing around them and review their own organization’s audience measurement practices.

Despite the challenges and the confusion about specific numbers, newspapers are on the right track with a focus on audience, said Shawn Riegsecker, chairman and CEO of Centro LLC, media planning and buying firm. “It’s the right thing for the industry.”

—John Heys

NAA mediaXchange : mediaXchange 09, Audience-FAX

Measuring—and Defining—Audience