NOTE: This post has been updated.
In less than 10 days (March 30) the 2006 topline results and the underlying detail only available to subscribers) will be released by the Print Measurement Bureau (PMB). One thing's sure: not everybody will be happy. In the rolling, two-year study of 24,000 respondents across the country,some magazines lose ground and others gain in total readership.
It has been a few years now since PMB changed to a "Recent Reading" methodology as opposed to the "through the book" method. This was considered to be more closely comparable (in an apples to apples sense) to what competing media were doing. But it also means that it is more likely that respondents will be included as readers for simply recognizing the name plate of a magazine. This gives a significant "incumbent" effect, whereby well-known brands benefit, as do magazines that strategically promote themselves, with everything from contests to billboards. It also means that a magazine can claim readers simply by buying prime newsstand real estate.
Still, there is no question that PMB has become the "gold standard" of the business, against which all other magazines are measured. It must be remembered that the number of titles participating, which made up mostly of largest and best-known national magazines, form a very small part of the total number of titles in the industry. But when it comes to guesstimating their own reader-per-copy figures, most non-PMB magazines compare themselves to similar titles inside the study.
Agencies and big advertisers tend to put most of their magazine advertising dollars into titles that not only reach their target audience, but make themselves easily measurable by paying to belong to PMB. This is so much so that magazines which were previously not in PMB (like
Cottage Life) have more or less been yielded and done it, even though membership comes with an average $20,000 membership fee. Fees are based on a circ, frequency and page rate formula. A big magazine such as
Chatelaine pays $60,000; a typical monthly with a page rate of $7,600 is charged $14,000. A 6x magazine with a $10,000 page rate would pay $8,900.
Like many such benchmarking systems, PMB can dispense fairly rough justice: in some cases, finding a magazine has 20 readers per copy (making it extremely efficient at reaching a target audience) or less than 1 (usually when a magazine has a huge, sometimes controlled, circulation and has nowhere else to go to find its audience).
PMB doesn't claim to speak to the quality of the audience's engagement with the editorial, mind you. It is a commercial tool, and an important one. It can tell you who reads, and what canned soup they buy, but raw readership and buying habits arent 't everything. Whether inside, playing the game, or outside, being influenced by the outcome, magazines would do well to remember that.
Next week, we'll do our best to give you those important topline numbers and some analysis.
Labels: measurement, PMB
