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Business News/ Opinion / Online-views/  Mainstreaming digital media
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Mainstreaming digital media

Clearly, audiences have moved online from print, but advertising, to a similar extent, is yet to follow

More people now read the online versions of newspapers than print. Photo: Priyanka Parashar/MintPremium
More people now read the online versions of newspapers than print. Photo: Priyanka Parashar/Mint

On 9 September, the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), a non-profit body for measuring and auditing newspaper and magazine circulation in the country, announced its plan to start measuring digital audiences—a move that clearly signals the mainstreaming of digital media. The service will be launched in collaboration with information and research firm Nielsen.

Measuring their digital audiences was probably the natural next step for newspapers, which have already taken their publications online. But for a purely print media body like ABC to take the decision to launch a digital currency is significant.

For starters, more people read the online versions of newspapers than print. Samir Patil, founder and chief executive officer of news site Scroll.in, claims that there is an audience online that now exceeds the reach of print and rivals that of television. Right now these media coexist in a multi-platform world, but their market shares are likely to change over time, underscoring ABC’s choice to study online consumption of newspapers.

Times Internet Ltd, the digital company of the Times Group that runs several online brands including those of the group’s newspapers The Times of India and The Economic Times, among others, does not disclose its digital audience size site-wise, but its CEO Satyan Gajwani says that at a network level, it reaches about 140 million unique users a month, contributing one billion visits at 13 billion minutes spent in a given month.

Clearly, audiences have moved online. But advertising, to a similar extent, is yet to follow. This Year, Next Year, the annual advertising forecast report by media agency GroupM says digital advertising for 2015 will constitute 9.51% of the total advertising expenditure in India.

The number may be small, but the growth in digital is the fastest at 37%, according to GroupM. The segment grew at an average of 35% in the last two years, driven by expansion in video, mobile and social. The report, released earlier this year, pegged television advertising growth at 16% and print at 5%.

There may be several reasons why advertising didn’t move online at the same pace as audiences. It may have something to do with the advertiser mindset, lack of creatives or absence of audited measurement services. The ABC-Nielsen digital audience study could resolve the last and biggest concern of the three.

As mentioned earlier, ABC’s decision to track digital numbers of publications is a pointer to the mainstreaming of digital media. Currently, publications use many different measurement yardsticks and agencies ranging from third-party tracking sites like Alexa and comScore to Google Analytics and Parse.ly. The trouble with tracking sites like Alexa and comScore is that publishers rarely agree with their numbers. In the case of tools like Google Analytics and Parse.ly, even though their numbers may be fairly accurate, they are not visible to others and in the absence of an agency to audit them, they cannot be relied upon by advertisers.

Besides these tools use different methods to measure traffic which, in turn, produce differing numbers, compounding the confusion for potential advertisers. Some tools, for instance, grab the numbers from a website’s own servers, while others have a panel-based approach with monitoring software at the user end, which tracks where they go.

In addition, as digital audiences become increasingly important for news companies, some of them are also building their own analytics systems, avoiding third-party tools for collecting reader data.

By its very nature, the Web is the most easily measurable media. It is possible to track, with a high degree of precision, not just who, but also what, where and how any content is being consumed. Uniformity and authenticity in measurement systems, and the ensuing results will allow news creators, consumers and marketers to focus on even thinner slivers of user needs.

News media owners agree that the biggest gap in measuring digital today is the lack of a credible, third-party external intelligence provider as most companies quote data using different software or means of measurement.

ABC’s new service is likely to change that. It will be available to all digital properties and not just newspapers, and will have a panel both for desktops and mobiles. The new system, ABC promises, will be robust. It will fire tags in the publication sites and record readership. A sample will be created to capture the demographics, which can then be extrapolated—like the way it is done by the Broadcast Audience Research Council India, the audience measurement service for television.

Audited data by an agency like ABC could just be the need of the hour to give a push to digital advertising. It will make media options more comparable.

Shuchi Bansal is Mint’s media, marketing, and advertising editor. Ordinary Post will look at pressing issues related to all three. Or just fun stuff.

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Published: 17 Sep 2015, 12:48 AM IST
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