feature focus

Why circulation
is irrelevant

By Michael France and Justin Dini, Brunswick, New York

don’t let declining numbers at traditional

publications convince you that their influence
is necessarily waning.

H
ow many people read newspapers, magazines,
and websites? And who are they? These have long
been critical questions for advertising executives
and communications professionals trying to reach the biggest
or most appropriate audience. But while the circulation figures
of international publications such as the New York Times, the
Handelsblatt, and the Financial Times may appear to be
impressively specific, authoritative, and objective – offering
detailed data on incomes, spending patterns and education
levels – they have never been as reliable as they appear to be.
And in the age of the BlackBerry, Kindles, home computers,
airline televisions, and other electronic news sources, the
official numbers are becoming even less useful.
At this stage, it is safe to say that circulation is almost dead
as a meaningful concept. To try to capture the new multi-
media, multi-channel, multi-device reality, publishers and
broadcasters are developing new metrics that offer a better
reflection of their readership. CNN recently claimed leadership
in each of the following categories: “Total TV and web
consumers,” “TV/web multi-platform integrators,” “Total
(online) usage minutes,” number of “video streams,” “Mobile
web users,” “Mobile TV viewers,” “Audio podcasts,” and “Video

30
podcasts.” Scarborough Research and the Newspaper bulk circulation claims by newspapers, and a number of UK
Association of America (NAA) have joined forces with the titles have reportedly decided to eliminate bulk sales from
Audit Bureau of Circulations to launch “Audience FAX,” their calculations of paid circulation, substantially reducing
which measures a newspaper’s weekly print readership, sales figures.
online readership, and the combined print and web readership. By these measures, the circulation of many of the most
In June 2009, The Media Audit, venerated brand names in the media is
a Houston, Texas-based syndicated the seemingly obvious steadily sinking. According to the Pew
media ratings service currently covering implication… is that Research Center’s Project for Excellence
more than 80 metropolitan markets, communications in Journalism (PEJ), circulation for
released data looking at the top United professionals should daily US newspapers fell 4.6 per cent
States newspapers’ “reach” in their direct less attention to and 4.8 per cent for Sunday editions in
respective markets. The concept of the old titans of the the six months ending September 30,
“reach” combines unduplicated print mainstream media. but 2008, compared to the same period a
and internet audiences. According to that conclusion does year earlier. Since 2001, daily newspaper
The Media Audit, the New Orleans’ not really stand up to circulation has fallen 13.5 per cent and
Picayune Times and its companion site, closer scrutiny Sunday paper circulation has declined
nola.com, reach 83 per cent of their 17.3 per cent.
overall market. That downward trend has, furthermore, been accelerating.
The problem is that these next-generation metrics are still In the six-month period ended in March, circulation dropped
not yet broadly accepted in the US or anywhere else. “A procedure another seven per cent compared with the previous year,
for measuring audience penetration levels for both printed and according to figures released by the Audit Bureau of
online newspapers that is both accurate and accepted by business Circulations. (One exception to this broader trend is the Wall
advertisers has not yet been devised,” the Bundesverband Street Journal, which reported a gain, albeit only 0.61 per cent,
Deutscher Zeitungsverleger (the Federation of German in circulation in the six-month period between October 2008
Newspaper Publishers) concluded in a 2008 report. and March 2009, according to ABC figures). (See Figs.1 and
2 overleaf).
circulation: myth and reality The seemingly obvious implication of these numbers is
So what to do? Before answering this question, it is useful to that communications professionals should direct less attention
start with some basic definitions. In the US and the United to the old titans of the mainstream media. But that conclusion
Kingdom, “paid circulation” is defined by the Audit Bureau of does not really stand up to closer scrutiny. For one thing, the
Circulations as the number of newspapers paid for by an concept of circulation has never adequately captured the size
individual reader or distributed via “specialized channels.” For of a given publication’s “audience” – the number of people
example, as of March according to figures released by the Audit who actually read a newspaper or magazine. That is where
Bureau of Circulations, the circulation for the weekday New outfits like Mediamark Research & Intelligence (MRI) in the
York Times was 1.039m. Of that group, 65 per cent receive the US and the UK’s National Readership Survey (NRS) come in.
Times at home, 21 per cent bought it on newsstands, and 14 Each conducts tens of thousands of interviews a year to gauge
per cent is via “bulk sales.” Bulk sales are the copies newspaper reading habits, including how many people read an individual
groups sell for a nominal fee to airlines, hotels, gyms and issue of a magazine. According to most recent data from MRI,
restaurants (which may give them away for free). They are for example, an average issue of BusinessWeek is read by 5.28
controversial, because the publisher need only haul more adults and has a total audience of 4.67m readers, down slightly
copies to the nearest airline terminal to boost circulation. from the 4.7m readers the magazine had in 2008. (Compare
Indeed, in the UK ABC is conducting a “forensic review” of this to a paid circulation figure of roughly 900,000.) In

Brunswick Issue two 31

Review Winter 2009
the UK, according to the NRS’ latest figures, while its circulation
fig.1: total audience
has fallen, the Financial Times has seen its estimated UK Audience (000s)
readership jump 15 per cent in the 12 months to the end of
Spring 2004
March 2009, compared with the same period the previous Spring 2009
year, to an estimated 417,000 per day.
Now enter the internet (see Fig.3). The standard BusinessWeek
4,666
measurement of a given website’s total audience is “unique 4,687
users” – the number of times an individual visited a website Fortune
3,714
in some defined time period, say a week or a month. By this
3,945
measure, it would appear the content produced by news Wall Street Journal
organizations appears to be getting consumed by millions more 3,673
3,325
people. Traffic to news websites is growing even as the outlets New York Times (Daily)
themselves are losing advertising revenues and in some cases 4,349
2,922
facing extinction. According to a Pew PEJ analysis of comScore
The Economist
data, the average number of unique visitors to the top 50 US 2,540
news sites each month grew 27 per cent in 2008 over the year 2,898

before. The number of monthly unique visitors to all 700 news

and information sites measured by comScore grew seven per
cent. So the seemingly dire picture presented by circulation Source: MRI and Audit Bureau of Circulations

statistics is misleading.
The statistics are impressive, to be sure, but as the Pew
fig.2: circulation
Center’s PEJ State of the News Media 2008 report points out, Audience (000s)
the new online standard – unique monthly visitors – does not
2004
measure intensity of reader engagement. For example, readers 2009

of the physical edition of a newspaper spend vastly more time

with the paper than those who visit the web version. In June,
Wall Street Journal
the average individual spent 38 minutes and 24 seconds, in 2,061
1,685
total, at newspaper sites over the course of the entire month,
The Economist
according to Nielsen Online. Contrast that with the most recent 902
data available from the UK’s NRS, which found that the average 1,418
New York Times
UK newspaper is read on average for a total of 50 minutes 1,157
every day. 1,065
Fortune
As is the case with circulation numbers, online traffic 902
numbers need to be read with a grain of salt. “Those numbers 902

are all funky,” adds Alan Mutter, a former newspaper editor BusinessWeek
995
and venture capitalist who now writes Reflections of a 882
Newsosaur, an influential media blog. “Different people get
different counts from the same website all the time.” Mutter Source: MRI

served as the No. 2 editor of the San Francisco Chronicle before

joining InterMedia Partners, a media private equity firm. He
argues that the only meaningful statistic that matters is how
many are actually paying for the privilege. “The reason why it

32
is important to charge people for circulation is to validate the
passion of your audience for what you produce. That’s the
argument for charging for content on the web,” he says. In
addition to 20m visitors per month, WSJ.com claims 1.079m
paying subscribers. The Financial Times website, FT.com, has
117,000 paying subscribers (up 18 per cent in the first half of
2009) in addition to its 1.4m non-paying registered users
worldwide and average monthly unique users of 9.8m.
which buys advertising space for clients including Xerox,
MetLife, Chevron, and Accenture. “To reach the C-suite, the
people who are the decision-makers, there are still only so
many places to reach them.”
Or to put it another way: Don’t let the declining circulation
numbers at the traditional business outlets mislead you into
believing that their influence is declining. While the data is
difficult to interpret, the opposite may in fact be true.

circulation versus influence Michael France is a Par tner in Brunswick’s New York office. A former US
attorney, he ser ved as a Senior Editor at BusinessWeek where he oversaw
There is little doubt that so-called “influencers” are migrating the magazine’s coverage of management issues and legal affairs.

online. A recent study by Forbes Insights and Google

determined that the “internet has become the chief source of Justin Dini is a Director in Brunswick’s New York office. He was formerly
a speechwriter and business and financial journalist.
business information” for the C-suite. The survey of 354 top
executives at large US companies with annual sales of greater
than $1bn found that during work hours 70 per cent of
executives prefer to read “traditional” media online rather than
in print (30 per cent), and 69 per cent prefer to access fig.3: top news sites
“traditional broadcast media” online rather than over the Unique visitors

air. Brunswick’s own research with investors and analysts 2007 2008

(see pages 27 to 29) shows a similar trend. Yahoo! News

35.5 million 40 million
As these readers move online, the world’s most enduring
news brands still claim their attention. According to its 2008– MSNBC
27 million 33 million
2009 Opinion Leaders Study, research company Erdos &
Morgan found that The New York Times reaches nearly 61 per CNN
23.5 million 31.5 million
cent of US opinion leaders, followed closely by the Wall Street
Journal, which reaches 59.5 per cent, NBC Nightly News, with AOL News

48.1 per cent reach, USA Today, with 48 per cent, and ABC 23 million 27.5 million

World News Tonight, with 44.4 per cent.  According to Erdos New York Times
& Morgan’s 2009 study of the reach of digital media among 9.5 million 12.5 million

opinion leaders, Google News reaches 46.8 per cent of opinion

Tribune Papers
leaders, followed by the New York Times, CNN.com, Yahoo! 10 million 12 million

News, the Washington Post, MSNBC.com and the Wall Street

Fox News
Journal. What is behind the enduring lure of these brands? 7 million 8.5 million

Chiefly, the fact that new online news outlets are viewed with
ABC News
more skepticism than their established print, broadcast and 8 million 8 million
cable counterparts. According to Pew’s 2008 State of the News
Media report, of the seven online news organizations it CBS News
8 million 8 million
evaluated, none is viewed as highly credible by even a quarter
of online users able to rate them. USA Today
7 million 7.5 million
What does that mean? Plus ça change, says George Janson,
Source: comScore
Managing Partner and Director of Print at Mediaedge:cia,

Brunswick Issue two 33

Review Winter 2009