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Readers, viewers, browsers: it's time to count them all and unify the ratings
How do you tell success from failure? No, don't mention Michael Gove: this is big business stuff with big media money attached. Sometimes it's simply judged: look at the US weekend box-office figures for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and you know in an instant that Rupert Murdoch is about to become an even richer old boy, with $100m rolling in for starters. Click on the TV viewing figures from Barb and you can see, with apparent precision, that 16.7 million BBC viewers were watching the World Cup final last Sunday at 10.30pm, while ITV trailed in with a mere 3.8 million. Some things – cash registers chinking, meters recording – are easy and mechanical. And then there's the metrics morass.
Consider newspaper sales recorded by the Audit Bureau of Circulation. Those monthly figures tell you average sales on publication days, how many copies, how many subscriptions, how many bulks or overseas papers. Add in unique browser digital numbers (as supplied, like print statistics, by the publishers themselves) and there's a decent rough guide to coverage.
But actual sales – across magazines and regional papers as well as nationals – don't tell the whole story advertising agencies need before they place ads. Enter another joint-funded monitoring organisation, the National Readership Survey, which uses a giant sample – people chosen from a 36,000-strong base every year – to reveal how much of the Daily What was read by who, and now adds a second survey to put print and digital readership together. Radio operates in a pretty similar fashion, with interviews and diary-noting from approximately 100,000 respondents over 12 months – but it doesn't deal in daily figures, just weekly. Nothing quite compares. And there's our old friend Barb, the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board, boasting a metered panel of a mere 5,100 TV households