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Why it’s dangerous to compare print figures to website stats

April 14, 2009 By Dan Thornton 16 Comments

Although hardly newspaper/print apologists, both John Duncan and Martin Langeveld have posted interesting articles trying to compare the print/online split in newspaper readership in number terms. Duncan comes in with online having 17% of page impressions on Inksniffer using the Guardian as a case study, while Langeveld posts that only 3% of newspaper reading happens online.

While I totally agree that it’s easy to overestimate the online figures in comparison to print products, and both articles are good reality checks, I have to say that I think comparing print and online readerships directly in this way is equivalent to comparing the number of people who drive cars with the number of people with vowels in their name.

And touting the eventual figures is very dangerous.

For starters, the readership of print titles rests on research figures for average shared readership of titles. For instance, the metrics John Duncan quotes are:

From 2007:

Average daily UK uniques for Guardian website: 270576 (after discounting overseas readers etc).

Average UK sales of Guardian/Observer: 310788

But then the UK sales figures is multiplied by 3 to take into account shared readership, becoming 932,364, on figures available by the Guardian.

Meanwhile Langeveld refers to an engagement study from the Newspaper Association of America conducted in February 2006, based on 4594 respondents to a survey.

Now shared readership definitely happens, and without being able to actually see what people do, rather than what they claim, it’s impossible to be totally accurate.

But…

If you’re taking shared readership of print products into account, then surely you’d also need to factor in people reading newspaper website content without ever being logged as a visitor to the site?

That includes people blocking cookies, people using RSS, people reading reposts of newspaper content (Great example of the spread of multimedia news by Martin Belam by the way), people reading content via aggregation sites and site scrapers etc, etc.

And by the time you’ve taken into account all the vagaries of print readership figures (which aren’t a bad guide to something so difficult to measure), and then taken into account the vagaries of online measurement (Less inaccurate, but still pretty fairly vague), and using data and research from 2+ years ago (But that’s probably the most recent readily available) it starts to be apparent that quoting a an exact figure is pretty irrelevant – especially when some people will undoubtedly take it as gospel.

After all, two years ago, Facebook didn’t have 200 million users, Twitter had just launched, there was no iPhone, there was less broadband penetration in the UK, there hadn’t been events like earthquakes or Mumbai to highlight realtime information, etc, etc.

And there’s a big elephant in the news room: Whoever said that print newspaper readers were guaranteed to only be getting their online news from newspapers?

I can get digital news on my mobile or my PC, via text,audio or video, and via social networks, blogs, websites, link aggregators, RSS, podcasts, videocasts, and from global sources. Whether or not print titles are only seeing a small percentage of their print readership visiting them online is less relevant, than how many of those readers are getting news content online from any source.

So what can you do?

When it comes to looking at the situation now and for the future, the numbers are far less important than looking at data trends. I’d much rather base a theory or business strategy on a few years of data showing a rise in one area and a fall in another. The numbers are rough guides to point towards when the trends are in the same area, but that’s all.

Just to reiterate, I don’t want to criticise John and Martin for doing what is a useful, if flawed, exercise to highlight caution in assuming that online readership is bigger than it really is, or that print readership is smaller than you might think. As I tried to comment on the Nieman Labs site (sadly it vanished into cyberspace after I submitted it), it’s the way the information is being presented that worries me.

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Filed Under: Digital Publishing Tagged With: comparison, digital, Digital Publishing, engagement, figures, newspaper, newspaper association of america, percentage, print, publishing, readership, stats, the guardian, trends, unique users, visitors

How cool are these?

February 25, 2009 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

Even if I wasn’t working with FHM on various promotions, I’d be just as impressed by the posters they’ve produced for the 100 Sexiest voting. Particularly these two from the selection to download as posters and wallpapers:

FHM 100 Sexiest Voting - Adriana Lima Poster

FHM 100 Sexiest Voting - Olga Kurylenko Poster

Meanwhile I’m helping with their Twitter account, and new Facebook page amongst other things.

Amongst the doom and gloom about the print industry, it’s nice to highlight some of the work done by incredibly creative and talented people that will translate to whichever medium they work with.

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: 100 sexiest, bauer media, creative, fhm, magazines, print, Uncategorized, voting

Viral of the wrong sort – consumed by colds!

January 10, 2009 By Dan Thornton Leave a Comment

My son has only just started going to nursery, but has already picked up the first of the inevitable stream of colds he’ll get over the next year or so – and not only is he suffering, but he’s kindly passed it to both parents!

Hence a bit of a lack of blogging, but some interesting conversations with his mum about how how we think he’ll consume information and entertainment in the future.

For instance, her belief that children’s books in print will be just as prevalent in 5 years time because he’s already turning the pages of his books.

My belief that might not be the case, because he might not be ‘turning the page of a book’, but simply trying to interact with something in front of him.

I’m not suggesting either of us is necessarily right – but it’s interesting comparing the different views – me as the web geek who spends his work and spare time talking about blogs and Twitter, and her as the more practical mother who only gets a few minutes each day to catch up with friends via Facebook and a couple of mothering messageboards.

When the likes of Oprah recommend something like a Kindle, there’s definitely big changes coming, whether or not the eventual mass-adopted solution looks anything like what’s out there.

Having said that, I’m currently indulging in more dead treee reading – re-reading Communities Dominate Brands: Business and Marketing Challenges for the 21st Century and thinking about smartphones and convergence. If you haven’t read the book, it’s worth catching up with the blog as well, at Communities Dominate Brands.

Right, back to the group huddled on the sofa sniffling…

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Filed Under: Digital Culture, Digital Publishing Tagged With: alan moore, Books, children, communities dominate brands, convergence, Digital Culture, Digital Publishing, print, tomi t ahonen

Are efforts to get boys reading more barking up the wrong dead tree?

January 8, 2009 By Dan Thornton 4 Comments

As a relatively new father, I’ve suddenly become far more interested in the educational merit of the transition from dead-tree print to digital, in addition to the implications for journalism and marketing.

So I paid a little bit of attention to the Oxford University Press launching a range of ‘computer-esque books to encourage boys to read‘. (link to BBC story).

Apparently the books have been tested in 2000 schools, and can be made interactive via CD-Roms (Are we back in 1995?) and whiteboards.

Two quotes in the BBC article got me thinking:

One from Charlie Higson (author of the Young Bond books):

‘”The point is that books are different to computers – that’s the whole point. If kids want to play with computers, they’ll play with computers, not read these stories.”

And one from Elaine Millard from the National Assocation of Teaching English

“What we have to do in schools is get that enthusiasm back for words on the page.” (emphasis mine)

Seems to me that Charlie makes a very good point for all print businesses – instead of bemoaning the fact that kids or adults are spending time on computers, perhaps we should either be making better print experiences, or better online experiences?

And I think that ties into the idea that we need to only have enthusiasm for words ‘on the page’.

Because, presumably, going into the school library and spending 40 minutes trying to find the right entry in an Encyclopedia bought the last time a school governor donated funds in the 1990s has more merit than searching Wikipedia, and it would be impossible to find literary merit in staring at a computer screen, or to combine something like a great computer game with some humour, intelligence and problem solving?

Coincidentally, whilst writing this, I spotted Dave Cushman linking to Dr Chris Thorpe‘s thoughts on both Dave’s book, and the power of print.

There’s an interesting change taking place – I still love reading books, and used Christmas as a chance to catch up on quite a few, and I can agree to an extent with Chris that reading print can have benefits (not getting distracted by links, or by other online services would be probably the main point which couldn’t be replicated online).

But what’s also interesting is that Cush’s book collects and organises thoughts which have appeared on his blog in a way that perhaps gives them more meaning due to the recurring themes – but the interactions that led Chris to read it is from meeting in person, and doubtless interactions via email and social networks.

Perhaps it’s not the actual content of great books which would have to change, but the ways in which we can help people discover them?

As an example, off the top of my head – people seem to have vastly different views on the idea of enjoying Shakespeare outside of academia, which seem to be driven by how they experienced it. For instance, I had some great English and History teachers who really put some life into Shakespeare – and also had parents who took me to see a handful of excellent Royal Shakespeare Company productions – some of which transposed Shakespeare with modern props and settings – Julius Ceasar stood in a transformed Kent sports centre next to a tank for example.

So rather than trying to corral kids into reading books by imitating things they’d rather be doing, perhaps we should be looking at how the things they’d rather do could be inspirational and interesting – could there be English and History scholars having conversations on Twitter, or could kids be siding with the Montagues and Capulets on a Facebook application?

After all, most of the books I read are by people I can contact via their blogs, emails and social networks and engage with to increase my understanding. Why should kids be denied the same opportunities?

The important thing is that we should be teaching children about the huge amount of ways they can find, enjoy, share, discuss, and interact with information in every format, and the benefits of each. And ensuring that we work with them to make sure what is produced is something engaging rather than patronising.

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