Approaches to traditional media measurement
Every major platform for news, as for media more broadly, relies heavily on third‐party measurement firms. This is especially true in the corners of journalism that count on advertising as a main revenue source. From the perspective of a publisher or broadcaster of news, media measurement — which typically means audience measurement, even when audiences arenʹt being directly polled — fulfills three distinct but overlapping needs:
- Understanding audiences, for editorial as well as commercial
development.
Evaluating competitors.
Selling ad space. This includes marketing audiences to advertisers
as well as setting ad rates and closing deals. In each case, the most basic role of media measurement is to achieve a consensus on the number of people reading, watching, or listening to a particular news outlet — and to the ads it carries. Has readership increased since the redesign? Did last week’s feature win viewers over? Can we command a premium with advertisers, based on our demographic profile? All of these questions revolve around measuring audiences. Source: authors’ research The $19 billion U.S. market research industry1tracking firms, offering a dizzying array of products based on various methodologies and data sources. However, among firms that measure media audiences, two broad approaches prevail. Panel‐based measures such as Nielsen’s TV ratings operate by tracking media usage within a small, carefully maintained panel of media users and extrapolating their habits to the broader population. Census‐based measures, so‐called because they purport to reflect the entire universe of media users rather than just a sample, are possible only where distribution offers some clue about that the size of universe — for instance, in records of the number of copies of a newspaper printed and sold each day. (A more accurate split might be between estimates derived directly from audiences and those that begin with media producers.)