Measurement of readership audiences is not new but the most recent media research, NRS’s PADD, is being seen as almost revolutionary. Up to now print and web editions of newspapers and magazines were measured separately. Not any more.
PADD measures publishers’ unduplicated combined print and website figures and then gives unduplicated figures for the platforms separately. It adds in the NRS demographic data too.
As well as monthly reach, PADD will show weekly and daily reach for websites. It will show pageviews and dwell time. That is on top of traditional NRS “time spent reading” data for print versions.
Why so significant. Well for publishers it demonstrates the strength of their brands. Consumers are reading the brand where they like, be that in print, on a laptop or on a smartphone or iPad.
On Mediatel Barry Mcilheney from the PPA commented: “For the first time publishers will be able to show their combined reach across both web and print, and in so doing dispel the myth that publishers are steadily losing readers. On the contrary, they are now reaching more readers on more platforms than ever before.”
Initial data published in September shows in the national press the Sun leads the way with the greatest number of combined print and website readers. The most read UK national newspaper has an overall average readership figure of 17.8 million over the month, the Daily Mail is a close second at 16.4million. The data shows a split for the Sun of 14.5 million print-only, 1.7million web-only; Daily Mail’s split is 9.6 million print only and 4.7 million online-only.
Within the qualities readership online has increased at a pace. The Guardian in fact now has readership of around 4.9 million web-only and print-only lower at 2.5 million, with 1.5 million reading both.
Overall newsbrands daily reach is nearly half (48.2%) of all adult males and weekly 74.2%. For females the figures are 40.1% daily and 66.9% weekly.
