John Duncan, the former managing editor of The Observer in Britain, is a newspaper consultant who writes a blog called The Inksniffer, and has lots of interesting things to say about what the industry should be doing. In one of his latest posts, however, I think he does more harm than good — or rather, he starts off on a good foot and then goes off the rails (to mix a metaphor). The post is entitled How Internet Metrics Promote the Myth of the Dying Newspaper, and his argument is that poor Internet traffic measurement makes the paper-Web balance look worse than it really is.
He is quite right about that, of course. As I have mentioned before (most recently in this post), Internet traffic rankings from all of the major firms — Compete, Alexa, comScore, Nielsen and Hitwise — are flawed in all sorts of ways, and combined with a continuing obsession with page views rather than unique visitors, it’s easy for Web audiences to look larger than they really are. And if John had stopped there I would have been totally onside. But after going through the numbers with admirable dedication, he arrives at the conclusion that “in the UK there were 310,788 people buying the Guardian or Observer on average each day in April 2007 [and] there were 270,576 reading guardian.co.uk online.” Not bad, right?
But then, he says that “We need to compare readers to readers, not readers to purchasers,” and falls back on what has become accepted wisdom in the newspaper business: that anywhere from three to five readers look at every purchased copy of a newspaper. In other words, the Guardian gets to multiply its readership by three at a minimum, which gives the paper more than 970,000 readers and online only 270,000.
As I mentioned in a comment on John’s post, this is complete rubbish — some of those copies might be read by two people, or maybe three, but plenty of them are read by no one. Steve Yelvington agrees with me, as he points out in a comment and on his own blog. He says: “the notion that a newspaper’s daily print sales figures should be multiplied by some factor to derive actual readers is wishful-thinking crap.” As Steve says, if we are to get anywhere, we need to be clear about what we’re talking about.