Webster's Dictionary of Audience Exaggeration: How internet metrics promote the myth of the dying newspaper.

Newspapers are declining (for lots of reasons), the websites of newspapers are growing (slowly, if at all). Newspapers sure have some problems to tackle. But a business strategy that puts your web presence first is one that ignores which of those products reaches the most people. Print may be fast asleep. But it's not even close to being dead.

Some official statistics make the internet audience for newspapers seem very large indeed. Much larger than they actually are. And we print folk fall for it. We hear numbers with the word million in them and we didn't want to question it. But we have to now. Because this is the fuel that feeds the ideas of newspaper managements across the globe and makes them leap over the revenue precipice. And frankly, the numbers for print and web are tough to compare accurately like for like.

The most honest web people even admit the numbers are more propaganda than fact. As Simon Waldman said in January, the use of monthly aggregates was "a trend started in the early days of the web, when we needed to make our user figures seem big enough within our organisations".

He, with vastly more experience and access to data than me, found it a complicated exercise comparing newspaper website to newspaper website, let alone website to print.

But when you do strip it down, what you find is that despite big numbers being bandied around it is not safe to assume that your newspaper website is anywhere close to your newspaper in reach.

I picked the Guardian not because I believe they are the worst and most dishonest, but because I know they are the best and most transparent. (And because Simon has already done some of the work for me.) They also run a hugely successful site and a less successful newspaper. If their web metrics don't look good next to their print version then I dread to think how some others stack up.

Okay, here's the maths ...

1. I looked on the MediaGuardian website to find newspaper ABCs.
351k average daily sale for the Guardian over the 25 issues from 1 April to 30 April 2007.
The Guardian has 1.24m average daily readership, according to the NRS figures quoted in the Guardian AdInfo website.
2. I looked on Compete.com to find out the Guardian's unique visitors in a month.
Compete say 1.7 million in the US.
3. I looked on Alexa.com to find out what proportion of the Guardian's audience is in the US.
26% of total audience are in the US, 32% (2.1m) in the UK.
4. I looked on the Guardian AdInfo site to confirm the Compete and Alexa numbers.
The Guardian AdInfo site says 15.7m unique users in a month in the world, certified by ABCe.
They say 34% (5.3m) of these unique users are in the UK.

Oh dear. 2.1m or 5.3m UK unique users in a month? Which is right? I'm no statistician but even I know that can't be a rounding error. I must be doing something wrong.

Then I think I'm terribly clever and I've found the problem. When I looked at the ABCe certificate it appears that the way they calculate monthly unique users is to add up the daily ones during a month, a very newspaper way of looking at the world. So if I came to the site for 30 days in a row, I would count as 30 unique users. But I'm not clever after all and in fact I'm wrong. The daily unique user list adds up to 23,874,360. The certificate lists 15,170,438 unique visitors in the month.

But I'm still lost. 2.1m or 5.3m? Well, the Waldman piece suggests that Nielsen agree with Compete/Alexa on a UK monthly unique user number of 2.1m. Can't I just use that number?

Sadly I don't think I can. My point is to try and work out a comparison with print, so I'm going to take the 23,874,360 number. It repeats unique users from one day to another, just like an ABC number for a newspaper would.

Simon would agree. His January 2007 post suggests that daily unique users are "perhaps the closest we can get to a print ABC".

So that's settled then: 23,874,360 total daily unique users over a month is our starting point for web unique users.

So how to bring the data together to compare it?
The average daily number of unique users for the Guardian is (23,874,360 / 30) = 795,812
34% of them are in the UK, which is : 270,576.

Like-for-like means being brutal with the print figure and cutting out dubious "sales" of the paper that might inflate the figure unfairly in comparing it to the web reach. So I take away the estimated foreign sale of 42k and bulks of 15k and therefore reduce the headline Guardian ABC of 350,940 to 293,940.

So for my purposes the Guardian sold a daily average of 293,940 single copies in the UK in April 2007.
Using the same methods the Observer, the Guardian's Sunday newspaper whose content slots in to their website on the seventh day, sold 463,128 copies, minus about 68k foreign and bulks, for a total of 395,128.

So total sales for the month were (25 x 293,940) + (5 x 395,128) = 9.324 million.
Average daily sale was therefore 9.324m / 30 = 310,788.

So in the UK there were 310,788 people buying the Guardian or Observer on average each day in April 2007.
There were 270,576 reading guardian.co.uk online.

Pretty close eh?

Except I am not comparing like for like. We need to compare readers to readers, not readers to purchasers.

I hate the hocus-pocus of the UK's National Readership Survey but let's assume a conservative ratio of purchasers to readers of 1:3. (The Guardian AdInfo site quotes a ratio of 1:3.35.)

That would leave us the following.

UK Guardian and Observer daily average print readers: 932,364
UK Guardian and Observer daily average online readers: 270.576

A reality check for the maths.....

Total issue readership for the month = daily average print readership x 30 = 27,970,920
Total unique users in a month = 23,874,360 (x 34% in the UK) = 8,117,282

Yup, still 30%.

So the actual reach of the internet version of the Guardian in the UK where the two can be compared is about 30%. And that's a paper whose website vastly outperforms its print product!

And you want to use that to tell me that print is on its last legs?

Let's assume for a moment that this situation is typical of other newspaper sites. If you assume the web audience grows by 5% a year forever and the print product declines by 5% a year, it will still be 2020 before the two are even equal. If newspapers hold the audience steady and the web still grows by 5% it's 2030 before they get level.

Next time someone uses web metrics to tell you that print is dead I have some advice. Laugh.

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