APN and Fairfax are joining forces to commission a review on the way Print Readership Research is done in New Zealand. They are looking their own requirements, and that of their advertisers, rather than at changing vendors.
Good on them.
It would be doubly interesting if the review could somehow relate online readership to print readership – and give us all a way to have metrics that are directly comparable.
If I read Stuff online one day and buy the Dominion Post the next then how am I counted? One reader total? One reader for each medium?
How do we track how much we are reading as a population? – the theory being that people are reading more news as it migrates online. Can we track overall readership of individual articles or different bylines no matter what the reader is looking at? An how does this all relate to advertising?
Could we create online equivilent ‘readers’ – and categorise online UB’s as readers based on, say, the amount of articles read or time spent reading in a period?
Then the question is how much reading online (1 article? 5 articles? 5 minutes?, 10 minutes) is equivalent to a daily newspaper reader? For that matter – how much of the newpaper do subscribers actually read now – do we know?
Lance Wiggs 