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Issue-by-Issue Magazine Measurement Launching This Fall

A new service called Readership.com provides audience accumulation data for magazine readership, effectively “doing for magazines what Nielsen has always done for telelvision,” says Rebecca McPheters, the magazine audience researcher who officially launched the service, in an article in MediaPost. The service uses a combination of online and print-based surveys to measure how - and how quickly - people read the 200 top consumer magazines, as well as the top newspaper magazines and the newspapers in which they are distributed. The new print ratings service is scheduled to begin continuous measurement of publication audiences this fall.

Mediamark Research, too, has been testing a system that is supposed to discover how quickly consumers read individual editions of print magazines, by conducting weekly, web-based consumer surveys that will supplement its twice-yearly printed surveys that have long been the main currency of magazine advertising buys.

Services such as these could offer not only greater immediacy of print audience estimates, but could also play an important role for marketers using sophisticated marketing mix modeling systems to measure the ROI on their marketing investments, according to McPheters.