Media
Mercury: ‘Still the top newspaper brand in the state’ …
NEW figures have confirmed the Mercury is Tasmania’s No.1 newspaper brand, reaching a total print and digital audience of 368,000 people each month.
Data from Enhanced Media Metrics Australia* ( More about EMMA below ) showed the Saturday Mercury’s average print readership was 125,000 Tasmanians.
The average Monday-Friday print readership was 113,000.
Mercury editor Matt Deighton said he was proud of the newspaper’s deep print penetration in the state and delighted the digital audience was showing very strong growth.
More people than ever are engaging with the Mercury, using a variety of platforms each day.
Mr Deighton said the digital growth, measured on computer, tablet and mobile delivery of news, reflected the newsroom’s commitment to breaking stories through the daily news cycle on all platforms.
The Mercury’s new mobile site, launched two weeks ago, was also showing rapid traffic growth as readers enjoyed the convenience of the new, easy-to-read format.
Extracts:
Senior media buyers are warning that a new readership metric bankrolled by Australia’s major publishers will struggle to get widespread takeup by agencies unless they get cut price access to the data.
Enhanced Media Metrics Australia (EMMA), has been underway for nearly four years as a project being run by industry body The Newspaper Works.
EMMA will offer readership statistics for Australia’s newspaper and magazine mastheads, in a move that seeks to challenge the existing industry readership metric provided by Roy Morgan Research. Some of Australia’s publishers – and News Corp in particular have been unhappy with Roy Morgan’s dominance of the readership metric since the 1970s.
Ahead of EMMA’s launch on Monday, Mumbrella has spoken to buyers from a number of Australia’s biggest media agencies who have cited a number of concerns about the new metric including: a lack of detail on the pricing structure if they choose to subscribe to the service, questions about whether Emma can be used for channel planning and budgetary concerns about paying for two readership metrics.
Danny Bass, who heads media buying for Australia’s biggest single media buying point, WPP’s Group M media agencies, hinted that the industry would view numbers which showed growing print numbers with some scepticism, and would resist any attempt to use the data to increase ratecards. He said: “Given the pressures that print publishers have been under for a number of years we are looking closely at the data and we will look closely at any changes to the pricing model,” said Bass. “However, they must be reflective of the overall media landscape.”
Bass’s comments come on the same day that the Audited Media Association reported double digit declines year on year in circulation for most of Australia’s newspapers and magazines**.
In a signal that the company is trying to move the conversation away from print numbers to an overall masthead audience conversation, News Corp declined to comment on the AMA numbers today, saying it would wait until next week’s EMMA numbers are released.
Click on the header above to read the full mUmBRELLA article …
**Read the latest print circulation figures here: mUmbrella: ABCs: Newspapers continue print declines with mixed results on digital subscriptions
Lindsay Tuffin …
… Which begs the question … I wonder what The Merc’s figures from Google Analytics are … ???
TT gets immensely excited by day-in, day-out stats from the TT’s in-house stats, done by AW Stats (well I do) because they are so positive for a tiny gnat on Rupert’s enormous arse:
But … the credibility advertisers apparently seek is provided by Google Analytics … the latest for TT is here
FOOTNOTE:
Circulation for Suntas is interesting. Two decades ago I became News Editor of Suntas; swapping with a colleague who became News Editor (then Night Editor) of Mercury. At that point Suntas circulation was 49,000. As I saw it, by providing readers with basically informative (newspaper-of-record) material – from a regular Books, to Arts, to Food and Wine, to Bushwalking. Gardening columns and a good TV guide, and appearing to be tabloid while providing real investigative grunt (courtesy of Tasmania’s then-best investigative journalist Simon Bevilacqua) circulation would gradually grow. And it did, topping 60,000 a few years later …