The Buzz Word for Newspapers Talking to Advertisers is No Longer “Circulation”; It’s “Readership” With “Quality” Close Behind

Philip M. Stone October 6, 2005

With many major newspapers suffering large circulation declines over the past few years, but still increasing their advertising rates, it seems only natural they no longer want to talk about circulation. No, the spin now is that advertisers should factor in how many people actually read a newspaper and whether they are the “right” people.

In other words, rates should be based on newspaper use rather than how many newspapers are sold. But will the advertisers go for it? The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) has launched a semi-annual study to count the number of people who read the top 100 newspapers in the US. Advertising agencies used to overnight ratings for television probably are not going to be overly impressed with two reports a year for newspapers!

To also show newspapers in a better light, the survey will report also the number of visitors to a newspaper’s web site. That’s important because recent studies show that the local newspaper is the most popular web site for news with some 20% of a community accessing the site, so readership takes a giant leap.

And to show the advertiser the true quality of the reader, the survey, called the NADbase that utilizes information from Scarborough Research and Nielsen/NetRatings, provides readership information by various categories including household income, gender, and age.

The NAA project comes on the heels of comments by major publishers earlier in the year that quality of readership should be taken into account by advertisers.  New York Times Publisher Janet L. Robinson said, “It’s very important for us to convert to a readership model as opposed to pure circulation numbers, which we are certainly in the process of doing.”

Dow Jones in a Wall Street Journal article said that the newspaper has always emphasized the quality of its circulation to its advertising customers. And in the same article came the basic response from the advertising side from Brenda White, a media director at Publicis’ Starcom Worldwide. “My perspective is that it is about quality circulation. We want to make sure we’re talking not only to a lot of people, we want to make sure we are talking to the right people,” she said.

On the other hand, newspapers are also keen to get large numbers in front of advertisers. So in addition to the Internet visitors they also want to put forward those who see their newspaper without paying – picking up a discarded newspaper on a bus, or in the office etc. According to the NAA the national daily average of newspaper pass along is 2.34 people so that alone more than doubles the circulation figures.

For example the Wall Street Journal today has an average weekday circulation of 2.1 million but under the NADbase study the WSJ can tell advertisers it really has a 5.1 million average weekday readership. And it can throw on top of that a daily web audience of 2.5 million. For the New York Times, with a 1.1 million average daily circulation, the average daily readership jumps to 5 million, and the unique web daily audience is a whopping 12.2 million.

With those types of numbers no wonder circulation is passé.

A major question the advertiser should ask is of those readers who don’t pay for that newspaper, how many go out and buy goods and services advertised in that newspaper? Or if the newspaper has been abandoned for some reason what reason is there to believe the original reader will remember any advertising?

What really needs to get measured is not how many people look at or read newspapers, but rather how effective are newspapers at selling their advertisers’ products as compared to other advertising medium. For a newspaper to be able to tell an advertiser the age, wealth, and sex of its readers is all well and good, but the game has moved on from that.

All advertising mediums have loads of research that show beyond any shadow of a doubt that they are best buy, but there is a change in the marketplace that newspapers have to be very careful about. Not only are old advertising platforms like outdoor advertising strengthening, but also there are new platforms that are seeing remarkable success ranging from viral advertising on the Internet to television product placement.

Advertisers for the past couple of years have been taking a much closer than usual look at the value they are getting for their spend, and there is no doubt that the Internet and product placements are going to see more funds directed their way, and some of that will come at the expense of newspapers. Newspapers are going to have to show not just higher readership numbers but effectively they are going to have to prove their value for money versus the new advertising opportunities now out there.

That has long been the fight between print and broadcasters, but now there are more fingers in the pie, especially the Internet and product placement, and advertisers really do seem to be looking at value for money in a whole new way.

The new NADbase survey shows that 77% of adults – about 115 million people -- in the top 50 US markets read newspapers each week, and on the web one-third of users (some 43 million) visited newspaper sites in July. How many of those buy from being prompted by a newspaper ad?

The truth is that with major entities such as the New York Times Company and Knight-Ridder recently announcing the shedding of some 1,000 editorial staff, there are clear indications that newspaper advertising forecasts for the rest of this year are not good. The problem in most industry sectors is not so much that the advertisers are not spending the money, but rather they are switching where and how they are spending.

Telling these advertisers there are actually more readers than circulation is fine for the numbers game, but what an advertiser really wants to know these days is not so much how many people see the ad, but rather how many people buy.

Show that newspapers really do a better and more cost effective job than television product placement or viral advertising on the web and that will be a survey well worth the paper it is printed on.

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