Researcher Affinity Launching e-Readership Survey

With people increasingly reading magazine content on screens of various sizes and types, Affinity is joining the race to come up with a way to measure magazines’ digital audiences. The research firm announced the launch of an e-Readership Survey to complement its American Magazine Study, which measures 170 consumer magazines’ print audiences. The survey is set to launch in Spring 2011 and would center on Websites, social networks, e-readers, iPads, PCs and smartphones. “What we’re going to do is measure across all of those platforms to look at the total audience delivery of the magazine brand,” said Tom Robinson, managing director, Affinity. “Digital is definitely a discussion with a lot of publishers these days, and certainly it’s a conversation at the agency level. If you talk to publishers, nine out of 10 would tell you there’s a need for a yardstick like this.” Starcom, the service’s first client, would agree. Brenda White, svp, publishing activation director at Starcom, said the new Affinity service would be a one-stop shop for data that she now has to pull from various research sources. “Publishers are putting their content everywhere from a digital perspective,” White said. “This is something that is going to really help me understand the consumer experience, by publishing brand, across all platforms.” A similar effort is underway at Affinity rival Gfk MRI (formerly Mediamark Research & Intelligence). Gfk MRI is working toward incorporating digital readership next year into its own magazine audience survey, the Survey of the American Consumer. While Affinity’s survey won’t measure the effectiveness of individual ads across media, it could aid understanding about how people’s engagement varies depending on where they’re reading magazine content. People will be asked a series of questions about how they interact with ads and how much time they spend with the magazine brand, platform by platform. White said those learnings could help buyers sell into new channels. Some buyers have been skeptical of the Apple iPad, for one, because of the scant data available on the number of users and how they’re interacting with the device. “Initially, it could benefit new channels, but depending on what the data say, it could give some more good news to traditional channels,” White said. “It could work for all extensions.” The survey will be conducted via the Web. Among the research challenges Affinity will face are figuring out how to ensure audience duplication and getting an accurate count of people reading magazines on tablets and other devices, like the iPad, whose penetration is still small. Robinson said Affinity would deal with those challenges by, respectively, recontacting the people it already surveyed for its print magazine audience study and by surveying an additional 60,000 people annually.

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Researcher Affinity Launching e-Readership Survey

Lucia Moses

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