Not as simple as ABC: how much is online media worth?
Excellent column once again in Observer Business & Media from Peter Preston today, this time on ABC (Audit Bureau of Circulation) figures and the need to express the value of newspaper brands' online audiences that looms ever larger and often more valuable than the print one.
It reminds me very much of what Steve Fowler, group editor of What Car?, and his plea for PRs to take a website with 900,000 unique readers a month as seriously as the paper part of his brand that sells 127,000 copies.
For Mr Preston the problem boils down to ABC's understanding of media lagging behind the times. Why is that - well because advertisers are involved:
Agencies sit on the ABC council alongside newspaper executives, jointly determining the rules of the game. But the problem, many Fleet Street or regional circulation directors would chirrup at this stage, is that rule changes, only implemented by consensus, run far behind pulsating technological reality. The problem is wailing about death and decline when, in fact, only new ways of spreading the word are at issue. It's suicide by bureaucratic stultification, not inevitable obliteration.
So changing the rules to keep pace with the times is crucial. And they are changing, at last, in the most far-reaching way seen for decades.
He discusses the new US approach of "consolidated media reporting" approach to aggregating different types of readership including online:
And if America buys redefinition along such lines, how far behind can Britain lag? Not far at all. A few months ago, amid much secrecy, ABC in Britain took many of its most important circulation and advertising voices away for a day of blue-sky thinking and began to ponder profound systemic change. Sometime this winter, as consensus gathers, we will see new rules and categories of reach.
The value of online content and its reach is of course also different to offline in terms of its life (it will usually stay around a lot longer) and its longer term distribution - after it's initial publishing it is distributed daily to people who are likely to actually want to read it, via the magic of search engines.
Advertisers and publishers who really understand the online game may want to start thinking about ways to measure the value of whole-life readership for online content. Value that may be enhanced by its findability - i.e. how well it has been indexed by search engines and attracted attention of niche networks on the web which will value it.