The Published Audience Measurement Company (PAMCo) launched in April last year, replacing the NRS as a cross-platform measurement covering readership for newsbrands and magazines across phone, tablet, desktop and print.
While print was out in front as the most widely utilised form of reader engagement in PAMCo’s first few publications, this changed in June. The PAMCo 2 2019 survey, which tracked the period from April 2018 to March 2019, showed that print had fallen behind phone for the first time, with a monthly reach of 34.6 million, compared with phone’s 35.7 million.
This represented a decrease for print of around 800,000 monthly readers from the previous survey, which Printweek reported on in March, with an increase of around 1.4 million for phone.
In the latest PAMCo stats (PAMCo 3 2019), which were released earlier this month and tracked July 2018 to June 2019, print declined again, to 34 million, while phone saw another increase to 36.7 million. Elsewhere, tablet clocked 11.1 million monthly readers, with desktop on 19.4 million.
PAMCo chief executive Simon Redican told Printweek: “I think there will always be people who want to read a printed product and there will always be publishers who like to put their content out in a printed product.
“It remains significant, but if you look at the trend over time, print audiences are going to decline as people move onto digital devices, principally their phones, although tablet and PC are still reasonably sizeable chunks.”
PAMCo is funded by UK national publishers represented by the News Media Association (NMA) and the Professional Publishers Association (PPA) together with the agency customer body, the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA). PAMCo also has board representation from the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA).
NMA and PPA member publications and publishers are automatically included in the figures, though third parties can pay for subscriptions to see their own readership figures.
Among the newsbrands measured in the latest data, The Sun had the widest monthly reach of 32.8 million readers, though 25.6 million of these were via phone, with 7.7 million print readers recorded. Metro achieved the largest print reach, with 9.1 million readers engaging with its newspaper.
“It’s been a positive start for PAMCo. At a strategic level, the fact that it’s showing the proper size of the sector in the industry planning tool is good news,” said Redican.
“Both of the industry marketing bodies, Newsworks and Magnetic, use the data quite a lot to justify the fact that in terms of audience the sector has never been healthier and therefore advertising agencies ought to reassess it in terms of how much money they put into it.
“And I think that being able to quantify how much extra audience phone and tablet deliver is massively important from a commercial point of view.”
Separately, new IPA Touchpoints data has found that quality time spent with digital news brands is also on the up, increasing by 6% to one hour.
Print was still out in front on this metric, however, with readers spending one hour and 11 minutes with their print news brand, on the days that they read, and Sunday print readers spending one hour and 31 minutes.
