FT and UBM Built Environment figures show the changing face of audience measurement

The results are in. Remember when TheMediaBriefing carried a series of articles on the measuring audience and people moving away from the traditional ABC audit?

We reported how UBM and the Financial Times Loading... companies financial-times had opted for self-made metrics that encompass their entire audience footprint, with the figures monitored and verified by PriceWaterhouseCooper ( PwC Loading... companies pricewaterhousecoopers ).

Now we have the first fruits of UBM Built Environment's decision to go it alone:

The Property Week Loading... products property-week publisher says that in one week in November 2011 it reached more than 105,000 property and construction professionals via its Building, Building Design and Property Week brands, online and offline. This is an annually occurring set of figures designed to publicly show potential and existing clients the size and value of the UBM BE audience. UBM will evolve the system to encompass mobile and app data when it releases the figures again next year. See the stats for yourself.

Over at the FT, that title also announced last week it reaches 2.2 million readers a day in print, mobile and online (figures also verified by PwC). The audience for FT.com specifically surpassed the 900,000 a day mark - a figure 36 percent higher than last year - while mobile views have risen by 66 percent and tablet views by 71 percent in the last six months. (Here's a flashy video with more stats).

But before we continue on, for those looking for some context here is UBM Built Environment's digital director Phil Clark explaining the reasons behind the move on these pages and this is effectively the rebuttal of that strategy, from the ABC's Richard Foan.

UBM BE claims that it is the first B2B media brand to develop its own metric, the Weekly Audience Measure (WAM), which provides a total number of "engaged users" across all platforms, similar to the system used by the FT since 2010.

Behind the stats

The real benefits of using a measurement system like the one offered by PwC is the added information it provides managers and editors about users, or "super-users" as UBM BE puts it, who read both the site and the printed magazine in a week. So Building now knows that more than 70 percent of its all-platform readership are at manager level or above.

For the FT, it can now boast that the number of people who read the FT on more than one platform is 300,000, or 14 percent of its entire audience. That's the kind of stat that should give online sales staff more clout with media buyers, especially when going for the high-end brand sponsorship tie-ins that brands like the FT thrive on.

I'm a fan of questioning long-held assumptions and tactics as the media world shifts. I could see the benefits of this move at the time and the deficiencies in basing a measurement system on unique browsers, an inherently ineffective and unscientific measurement. Put simply, for a B2B brand, whether your monthly unique user figure is up or down on the last period isn't as interesting as who your readers are.

The ABC would argue - as they have before and done so persuasively - that titles need to be audited properly to have commercial credibility. And what the ABC does offer is a series of industry-wide metrics that can be compared across titles and sectors, including the recent addition of in-app measurement and research on content verification.

But it's inevitable that as the media world continues to fragment so too do the ways of measuring audience.

UPDATE: You can attend a webinar this afternoon at 3pm to learn more about how UBM does all this, if you really are a stats and analytics geek.