Measurement of Readership

Understanding reader behaviour across publisher media platforms.

We help publishers distributing newspapers, magazines, and digital content to understand the size, the makeup, and the behaviour of their audiences across different titles and platforms. These data feed into decisions on how best to maximise audiences with compelling content and how to promote specific content to high value readers. In addition, the data is used for trading advertising inventory between marketers, media agencies and media companies.

Ipsos employs a range of methods to measure newspaper and magazine audiences in over 40 countries worldwide – more than any other company. We recruit representative samples of adults (via face-to-face, telephone or online methods).

For titles with audiences too small to capture using national surveys, Ipsos has developed a unique modelling approach built around circulation and census data, alongside other inputs. This enables robust estimates to be made of audiences for even the smallest newspapers.

To collect information on total readership across a publisher's platforms (i.e. including print, online, mobile and audio audiences) we have developed an innovative approach involving respondents to install software onto the devices they use to access newspaper and magazine content This enables us to identify when and how often our respondents access publisher websites or apps, while also knowing in advance which printed titles they claim to read. By understanding the duplication of audiences between platforms, we can project the entire brands reach.

Readership surveys are predominantly face-to-face, probability-based methods, offering high quality data, but often at considerable cost. Ipsos has implemented digital data collection methods to moderate the cost of studies whilst continuing to deliver on the accuracy that face-to-face offers. In addition, we have integrated readership measurement into a broader cross-media service offering a 360 view for publishers across their properties.

Audience Measurement for Publishers - PAMCo

PAMCo – Audience Measurement for Publishers is the new audience measurement currency for published media. It produces de-duplicated brand reach allowing users to carry out reach & frequency planning and also plan and trade audiences across all the platforms on which published media content is delivered: phone, tablet, desktop and print.

The PAMCo survey began in January 2017. It replaces the NRS (National Readership Survey) which we have run continuously since 1977. It continues to offer a gold standard methodology involving face-to-face data collection on CAPI devices. This is built on the strong base of a large high quality pre-selected sample of 35,000 interviews in GB each year. The introduction of a 5,000 PAMCo digital Panel, recruited from within the main survey, provides measures of duplication of reading across digital and print. This is the first single-source data of its kind.

An additional innovation has involved the use of a new data set from comScore containing multi-platform digital data and the Ipsos Data Science team have developed an advanced data fusion and integration algorithm to merge with PAMCo survey data.

The NRS has always been the official source of Social Grade profile classifications used throughout the Market Research Industry. This will continue with PAMCo.

The new PAMCo currency is platform neutral and provides the following:

De-duplicated reach and frequency for all platforms
An increased number of brands reported across all platforms
Single source data to understand duplication between print and digital
Improved estimates of net brand reach and duplication
Reporting newsbrand sections across print AND digital
New engagement data