Replacing the National Readership Survey, PAMCo's cross platform datasets are designed to be the industry’s new audience measurement “currency”, spanning all platforms by surveying audiences through the combination of 35,000 face-to-face interviews and the latest in passive measurement techniques to chart digital consumption.
In its report, which covered the period April 2017-March 2018, it stated that 89% of all UK adults interacted with consumer magazine and news brand content in a typical month. It found that the total market reach of published brands was 47.2m adults – with 37.3m people reached through printed titles and 28.6m digitally via phones.
The less popular digital channels were desktop (16.9m) and tablets (9.4m).
“Our industry has seen an increase in published media being read online and in digital,” said PAMCo client services director Alison Finch. “We need a metric that can take that into account and our world-leading methodology provides that.
“This tool was not previously available to publishers to take into conversations with partners, clients, and so on. Now they are able to look at what their audiences are doing across all platforms and effectively commercialise this data.
“Print is still hugely important commercially and a very valuable platform for brands, though we will start to delve into that further as we begin to collect more data.”
In general, news brands maintain the greatest print-based brand reach – Metro reaches 10.2m people in print every month, the Sun 9.4m, the Mail 8.6m, and the Mirror 5.3m.
For most news brands, monthly reach in print was surpassed by reach on phones. The exception is the Times, which reaches 5.2m through print and 2.5m by phone.
Consumer magazines with the furthest print-only reach were Take a Break (2.6m), OK! (2.4m), Hello! (2.2m), What’s On TV (2.2m) and Radio Times (1.8m).
Digital reach was measured by downloading a passive tracker app onto 5,000 people’s digital devices that would measure their online brand engagement.
According to Finch, the age bracket 15-34 takes up a higher proportion of published content consumption than all other adults, so further developments of PAMCo’s model would centre around “digging in and analysing” this sector of the demographic.
