Mags Canada unveils set of standard metrics for digital editions

Magazines Canada has published a new set of standard metrics to provide advertisers, agencies and publishers with a consistent measure of engagement and readership in digital magazine editions. 

The guidelines outline a set of standard measurements in five categories of audience data. 

• total unique readers per issue
• total number of sessions per issue
• total amount of time spent per reader per session
• average number of sessions per reader per issue and 
• total accumulated time spent per reader per issue.

These would be measured over a period of 30 to 90 days (depending on the frequency of the title.) The information would be reported as a 6-issue rolling average on a 14-week release. Provision is made for special interest publications (SIPs) to offer a 120-day metric.

"This is an important first step in marketing our magazine media brands on multiple platforms," said Mark Jamison, CEO Magazines Canada. "By working together and with our partners in measurement organizations, Canada's magazine media will provide a better understanding of the remarkable connectivity audiences have with our brands on every device."

Startup company claims to measure not only how often a story is read, but its quality

Story Data Analysis 2/3 from Thoora on Vimeo.

Apparently a Toronto startup company, backed in part by Rogers Communications, has come up with a way to gauge audience sentiment that will assist editorial decision-making. A story on Poynter Online profiled Thoora, software that monitors more than 100 attributes and allows ranking not only by popularity, but by quality.

The company said the data could be used to figure out, for example, where to position an article on a page (aiding internal data from Web logs and analytics), how to apportion resources to cover a developing story or even how to follow up on offshoots that you might not have considered. It could help a news organization determine where its individual story ranks against competitors covering the same thing.

CEO Mike Lee said this is the first time that a tool has approached audience sentiment for news at the story level rather than the topic level...."We hope to not just be a quantity aggregator but to actually drive quality to the surface," Lee said.

[thanks for the tip to Kim Pittaway]

Is the ratebase doomed?

“The rate base is really just an anachronism,” said Rebecca McPheters, who is president of McPheters & Co., a consulting and research firm. “The value to the advertiser is not the number of copies or how they are paid for or distributed, but rather who reads it and who buys the advertiser’s product. It would be a very brave thing for Time to do and would be an exciting development for the industry.”

There is a frisson running through the magazine business about the possibility that Time magazine may lead the way in abandoning the longstanding habit of guaranteeing a minimum number of paid subscribers to advertisers.

A story in Mediaweek is but one part of the coverage. Time is considering dropping the rate base altogether. This has partly been prompted by the new, tightened rules imposed by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC). Where, previously, publishers had been able to lump in "public place copies" and other controlled of so-called "negative-option" subs with their paid base, now they have to break them out as "verified". This has meant that advertisers (who knew well how the game was played) are using the change to question the rates they are paying.

Time's most recent circ figures show that it has 4 million, but of those 350,000 are "verified". It could save a significant amount of money if it dropped its guarantee and let circ slide to the area where its crosstown rival Newsweek is (just over 3 million) and concentrated instead on other audience measures (metrics, to use the accepted term) such as reader engagement. In other words, emphasize quality rather than quantity. The magazine is to make its decision by November. Time would be joining almost 50 other ABC-audited titles which have already made the move. But if Time goes, a lot of other mainstream, well-known consumer magazines will follow suit, not just within Time Inc., but in other large players such as Hachette and Meredith.

Robin Steinberg, senior vp, director of print investment for MediaVest said “The question is, will advertisers agree to a different form of measurement that is exclusive of circulation? And if other magazines follow suit, will buyers just move money to different media?”

In Canada, ratebases have rarely been a factor. Because of the smaller market, Canadian magazines have emphasized instead measured readership totals through such devices as the Print Measurement Bureau. It just makes the numbers look bigger.

Free magazines are less valued & lack awareness, says MMR study

Was that a slight shiver that ran down the backs of the necks of controlled magazine publishers everywhere? Could be because they have seen a recent study commissioned by Emmis Communications, one of the largest publishers of city and regional magazines in the U.S. (Texas Monthly, Atlanta Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine, Indianapolis Monthly, Cincinnati Magazine).

The results of the admitedly self-serving study were recently reported to the 88-member City and Regional Magazine Association in the U.S and were published in an article in MediaDaily News. It says that consumer who receive unpaid subscriptions to upscale magazines are far less inclined to read them and -- when they do -- they value them less than magazines they pay for.

This has been an argument made for years by paid circ publishers, but there's never been much definitive to go by, except for the fact that controlled books tend to have lower readership in independent research like the Print Measurement Bureau.

The "affluent study" was carried out by Monroe Mendelsohn Research (MMR) and involved 2,250 randomly selected consumers in key markets. (We're not aware of -- but would be glad to hear about -- any similar study having been done in Canada, where controlled circulation is widely used and where newspaper-delivered magazines have proliferated.)

In Dallas, they found that only 4.5% of respondents had "never heard of" paid-circ Texas Monthly, while 80% were "unfamililar" with rival title Brilliant. Similar results were found in Atlanta and Los Angeles. (This, of course, may be yet another proof that branding helps people identify with a magazine, which is why eponymous city magazines or magazines with "Canadian" or "Toronto" in their name generally do better than those that do not).

Susie Love, executive vice president-director of sales and marketing at Emmis, says the company simply wanted to know what impact the incursion of free urban magazines were having on their market, and whether Emmis should also explore that approach. The answer, she says, was a definite "no."

"The reason we did it this was that we kept hearing from agencies and people from the [Magazine Publishers of America] making statements like, 'Does paid really matter?' We're built on paid circulation. And we felt if people are asking that question, we should find the answer."

Love says that following her presentation to the association, "eight or nine" other paid magazines are planning to conduct similar research in their markets.

Measures for measure

Being great exponents of the power of audience and readership, consumer magazine publishers may welcome the recent announcement that Mediamark Research Inc. (MRI) in the U.S. is testing whether the web can be used to see how quickly a magazine accumulates readers. This, according to a story in MediaPost. If successful, such a method could enable media planners and buyers to compare the reach and frequency of consumer magazines to those of media like TV and radio.

Mediamark said it will begin conducting weekly surveys with 2,500 individuals each week to determine if the Internet can be used to accurately measure how quickly consumers read individual editions of magazines. As with the Print Measurement Bureau in Canada, they will be shown magazine covers along with those covers' issue dates and asked whether they had looked into or read those particular issues and be asked how they obtained the magazines and where they read them, along with demographic data.

Marketers and agencies could conceivably use this data to better calculate advertising return-on-investment and "to develop an understanding of the factors contributing to issue-to-issue audience variability," said a Mediamark release. MRI says it is not intended to displace or replace, but rather to augment, its standard face-to-face interviewing.

Recently MRI announced another initiative, MediaDay, which reinterviews respondents to determine what media they use and for which purpose throughout a typical day.

Waiting for readership

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.