Although hardly newspaper/print apologists, both John Duncan and Martin Langeveld have posted interesting articles trying to compare the print/online split in newspaper readership in number terms. Duncan comes in with online having 17% of page impressions on Inksniffer using the Guardian as a case study, while Langeveld posts that only 3% of newspaper reading happens online.
While I totally agree that it’s easy to overestimate the online figures in comparison to print products, and both articles are good reality checks, I have to say that I think comparing print and online readerships directly in this way is equivalent to comparing the number of people who drive cars with the number of people with vowels in their name.
And touting the eventual figures is very dangerous.
For starters, the readership of print titles rests on research figures for average shared readership of titles. For instance, the metrics John Duncan quotes are:
From 2007:
Average daily UK uniques for Guardian website: 270576 (after discounting overseas readers etc).
Average UK sales of Guardian/Observer: 310788
But then the UK sales figures is multiplied by 3 to take into account shared readership, becoming 932,364, on figures available by the Guardian.
Meanwhile Langeveld refers to an engagement study from the Newspaper Association of America conducted in February 2006, based on 4594 respondents to a survey.
Now shared readership definitely happens, and without being able to actually see what people do, rather than what they claim, it’s impossible to be totally accurate.
But…
If you’re taking shared readership of print products into account, then surely you’d also need to factor in people reading newspaper website content without ever being logged as a visitor to the site?
That includes people blocking cookies, people using RSS, people reading reposts of newspaper content (Great example of the spread of multimedia news by Martin Belam by the way), people reading content via aggregation sites and site scrapers etc, etc.
And by the time you’ve taken into account all the vagaries of print readership figures (which aren’t a bad guide to something so difficult to measure), and then taken into account the vagaries of online measurement (Less inaccurate, but still pretty fairly vague), and using data and research from 2+ years ago (But that’s probably the most recent readily available) it starts to be apparent that quoting a an exact figure is pretty irrelevant – especially when some people will undoubtedly take it as gospel.
After all, two years ago, Facebook didn’t have 200 million users, Twitter had just launched, there was no iPhone, there was less broadband penetration in the UK, there hadn’t been events like earthquakes or Mumbai to highlight realtime information, etc, etc.
And there’s a big elephant in the news room: Whoever said that print newspaper readers were guaranteed to only be getting their online news from newspapers?
I can get digital news on my mobile or my PC, via text,audio or video, and via social networks, blogs, websites, link aggregators, RSS, podcasts, videocasts, and from global sources. Whether or not print titles are only seeing a small percentage of their print readership visiting them online is less relevant, than how many of those readers are getting news content online from any source.
So what can you do?
When it comes to looking at the situation now and for the future, the numbers are far less important than looking at data trends. I’d much rather base a theory or business strategy on a few years of data showing a rise in one area and a fall in another. The numbers are rough guides to point towards when the trends are in the same area, but that’s all.
Just to reiterate, I don’t want to criticise John and Martin for doing what is a useful, if flawed, exercise to highlight caution in assuming that online readership is bigger than it really is, or that print readership is smaller than you might think. As I tried to comment on the Nieman Labs site (sadly it vanished into cyberspace after I submitted it), it’s the way the information is being presented that worries me.
Cheers Dave, and totally agree that’s another point to include!
what the print figures never grasp are huge great lumpy valuable things such as: conversations generated, relationships fostered, content created, groups formed, action enabled and er… value created
Take a look at the content on the guardian’s site, for example. For each item of ‘printed’ news, there may be 10 items of UGC created.
If you only calculate value in readership terms you’re missing 90% of the value.
some great points dan. classic case of garbage in, garbage out…
@Doug,
I totally agree (see the section of the post talking about the elephant in the room) – it’s not a case of newspapers splitting readerships between print and online – it’s a case of that readership scattering to the digital (Computer and mobile) four winds to find whatever is the most appropriate way for them to keep up with life as individuals…
One of my favourite examples is the somewhat niche use of Greasmonkey as a plugin for Firefox to do all kinds of things to websites that the site owner is unlikely to ever know about (My post on it is called ‘evidence of end user control’)
Part of my current role is attempting to coordinate all the relevant channels and platforms from a marketing perspective…which is a fun challenge!
Your article, and Martin Langeveld’s are interesting reads, but I cannot help but think you are both missing several “online” methods of reading the News. RSS feeds, news aggregators, and Cell phone applications are also alternatives to physically reading a newspaper. I think, and this is with limited experience working for a paper in IT working with web and media specialists, that the paper’s websites are just one factor of the electronic delivery. While still relatively in it’s infancy, these methods are under the radar for reporting and scope. Not saying you are wrong, but these are factors that definitely influence how people get news without the paper.
Enjoyed the article, thanks.
Totally agree with you Dan. It’s apples and oranges. Apart from being based on some pretty major assumptions, it’s not legitimate to compare across different methodologies like this. Everyone is interested in more data on cross-media readership but I don’t think this is the way to do it. I believe the NRS are making moves in this area to provide some solid data for print publisher web properties so hopefully that will help
Thanks Dan for a fair critique of my original piece.
You are absolutely right about its flaws and I would also agree that the debate has moved on now. My interest in it came from a time when there was a question of allocation of resources for innovation and I was cautioning about sending all our smartest brightest people to work on websites whose audience was relatively small compared to the newspaper but seemed larger. We were feeding a sense that the internet had arrived as the future of newspapers becaiuse it was so huge and I was trying to force a valid comparative audience number from the oranges and apples that existed.
I also was cautioning against thinking that online revenue was going to pay for itself any time soon. That point has turned out to still be true and relevant two years later, which I’m very sad about.