Newspapers and the internet: Web metrics and the false impression of the power of online

He suggested you could also try to compare the web metric of page impressions. My recollection from a few years back when I had access to more data than I do now (I'm sorry I can't find anything online, so feel free to reject this) is that UK broadsheet readers on average read about 15 pages of the newspaper. That could be reality-checked with the Guardian's Sections research which says that an average weekday reader spends 54 minutes each day with the paper Monday to Friday, 94 minutes on a Saturday and 101 minutes on a Sunday with the Observer. That would average to 66 minutes a day or just over four minutes a page if they read 15 pages. Which sounds like a lot of time, but hey, it's their own numbers..

So with 1.239m readers, reading 15 pages, in a month with 25 issues (and the Observer's 1.445m reading a conservative 15 pages over the five April issues) that would put page impressions for the Guardian and Observer newspapers at 573 million. The Guardian's website ABCe certified page impressions for April 2007 throughout the world was 159,665,856. And that's even with the print version of the newspaper only distributing in the UK and Europe. So the global online page impression count for the website is 28% of that of the mainly UK print product.

If you do the UK calculations using yesterday's assumptions you get...
932,364 UK print readers. (x 30 x 15) = 419,563,800
Guardian AdInfo declaration of their UK page impressions = 71,331,729

Which suggests that the online site has only 17% of the UK page impressions of print.

I know internet publishers don't like to talk about page impressions any more. I suspect it's because the numbers look so big it might tempt someone to find out how they stack up under direct comparison.

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[The only unsupported assumption I've made is that a newspaper reader looks at 15 pages a day and it's a crucial assumption with a massive numerical impact. But if a Guardian reader is spending 54 minutes on the paper on a weekday and 94-101 minutes on a weekend, I'd be interested to hear someone suggest it's reasonable to assume they are reading fewer than 15 pages in that time.

[I also have to say that I don't actually believe that people spend 54 minutes reading the paper on a weekday. If I had any justification other than my previously expressed view that personal feeling that people exaggerate to researchers, I'd put it here. Anyone who wants to challenge this with better data would be most welcome.]

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