This month’s launch of NRS PADD (print and digital) data provides compelling new evidence to show how magazine brands are achieving ever-greater audience engagement and reach across multiple platforms. (Patrick adds: Read TheMediaBriefing's analysis and see the full data here)
This is an important first step in proving the case that far from losing readers, magazine brands are in fact reaching the same number of readers as before, if not even more, but now through other channels than just the one traditional platform of print.
While NRS has consistently delivered a robust, independent measurement of print readership, publishers have faced a challenge in recent years in combining this with online data to present a unified readership measure across print and online.
By now combining the existing, trusted NRS measurement of print readership with UKOM online data, advertisers and media agencies will for the first time have access to a valuable new measure that details the expanded reach of magazine brands across key content platforms.
The number of new metrics now available is certainly impressive. In no particular order, it will allow users to:
-- See the unduplicated reach of print publications and websites
-- The incremental reach provided by websites and
-- The websites that readers of print titles visit, and vice versa.
It also allows for the comparative audience profile for print titles and websites and, in addition to monthly reach, NRS PADD will also show weekly and daily reach for websites. Finally, it will also show pageviews and dwell time, the latter providing a useful bedfellow for the NRS Time Spent Reading print data.
Put simply, what all this research shows is that on a monthly basis, print titles reach more than 71 percent of the population. Their websites and portals are used by a quarter of the population, and – here’s the big one – the combined unduplicated monthly reach of all magazine media is a
massive 77 percent.
For some magazine brands that combined figure is thus already translating into readership figures well into the millions, which is a pretty impressive reach, especially when you consider that there are still other digital platforms out there yet to be measured such as mobile sites and tablet editions.
It will of course be interesting to see how this new data manifests itself among media agencies, and we would be very interested to hear feedback from planners and buyers over the coming weeks and months about how the new data is impacting upon the way they do business.
NRS PADD is then a significant step forward for magazine media measurement in a market that continues to evolve at pace. We welcome it with open arms, and we look forward to more of the same in the weeks and months ahead.
Barry McIlheney is the CEO of the Professional Publishers’ Association.
Main image by Mannobhai on flcikr via a Creative Commons licence.
