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Fleet Street loses out in complex numbers game



Both papers are acting forthwith. This means July's already diminished 9,000 and 12,000 copies respectively, given away free to punters on airlines, trains and the like, will no longer form part of overall claimed sales when August's results arrive. No padding left. If the Telegraph did likewise, its UK sale would be 669,000, a full 93,000 gone in a trice, and the Times would dip below 500,000. (The Mail and the Telegraph, moreover, would have saved themselves a separate bulks tangle with disputed figures going back months.)

Let's not get too holy on this trek after higher truth. The vagaries of foreign sales remain unscathed. And though advertising agencies are supposedly too smart to be fooled by bulks, they're also cute enough to know that thousands of copies scattered on business flights across Europe can boost a paper's profile, as measured quite separately by the National Readership Survey (NRS), which is a giant opinion poll cum census, not an audited total of physical copies going hither and yon.

But the wider difficulty is that nothing is simple anywhere you look in the print numbers game. The rules are set variously by industry and ad agency teams debating together. Self-imposed rules within rules - such as forswearing bulks - are not external rigidities. Sometimes, month by month, NRS and ABC results seem to head in different directions. Reading both sets aright is a matter of art, not science.

Yet hop over the paywalls of the future, into newspaper news as posted on the net, and you soon long for the old ways of Dead Trees Gulch. Here, in the steps of Rupert Murdoch, troop a profusion of pundits, outlining how papers might save themselves from extinction by turning a trickle of revenue streams into floods. Yet very little may happen at all, unless the tools of measurement that advertisers have when they make spending choices are open and robust. That's the last thing you can currently say about so-called "web analytics".

It ought to be easy. Switch on your laptop, click on the news site of your choice, and (for UK purposes) you're a "unique user", a formula that says utterly mechanically how many millions visited the Mail Online or Times Online last month. But rude mechanicals have their drawbacks. If a school class of 24 all read the Sun's website on the same computer in a morning, that would still only score one unique user, not two dozen, while a single user clicking on to the same site for two seconds to see who was Boob Babe of the Day would have exactly equal status. Not a terrific help if you're an advertiser trying to gauge the impact for your wares. Where's the beef? Where's the consistency?

Nielsen in America counts unique users, too, but via a giant sampling effort (much akin to NRS) that allows scope for far more demographic information and important additional facts, such as the amount of time spent online. Thus Nielsen will tell you that the average American unique user spent two hours, 31 minutes and two seconds online to Google in June, and that there were 156 million of them - just as, rather more painfully, it can detail how many users dropped in on the New York Times website and how long they stayed by comparison (under a tenth numerically, lingering one fifth of Google time). It also shows how the big hitters of cable such as MSN, CNN and AOL rout any newspaper site in a numbers race.

Is there some global standard for measuring net traffic, happily agreed? No: it's an argument. Pour in page views and visits on top (all with their snags and conflicting international definitions) and the argument only grows grimmer. As they struggle over differing methodologies between, say, ABC and Nielsen, potential advertisers may feel totally lost.

It ought to be simple. The information is there online. But if you can't extricate it, how do you expect more than a few categories of internet advertising to break through to good prices in great quantity?

The latest ruckus over Rupert and charging for net news arose because internet advertising can't take the strain of paying for quality content on newspaper sites. The imperative is somehow to find another way. Maybe the Mirror's new specialist site for football fans can trade access for cash as its undoubted power grows. Maybe the creation of print subscription "clubs" for the Telegraph or Guardian can foster more intense loyalties along with a willingness to pay for specific extra services.

But maybe, too, part of the answer to not enough advertising revenue lies in serving the advertiser better. Dumping bulks and abandoning empty bragging is a small step along that road. But the internet is a far more complex pile of cookies. The web analysis world talks increasingly about "engagement", which means defining who you are and what you're trying to sell to your own unique audience - particular pitches, particular evidence, damned hard work. That's not as exciting as slapping on charges here and there, applauding the word of Rupe as you go: but it's surely a part of the answer, too.

Lads dump their mags in droves

More numbers, less crunching - and hail, amongst other admiring things, to Private Eye, Empire, Vanity Fair, The Week and Grazia! They're all going up in magazine audited circulation. Hail particularly the Economist, which has doubled its sales in a decade. But hail and prospectively farewell to one genre that nobody seems to miss, for the lads are deserting their mags in droves.

Zoo, from Bauer, lost a very bright editor and has dropped 31.2% in a year. Nuts has seen 24.6% jump overboard, while Loaded has unloaded 23.8%.Simply, and starkly, this is one publishing niche just pushing off and dying out. Why goggle over glamour models in print when there's an infinite supply of them on a screen near you? Why risk eye contact and a newsagent's curled lip when you can log on in a deserted bedroom? Nuts today, shells tomorrow.

A triumph of style over content

Admit it sheepishly, but I've never been much moved by newspaper style books - commodious collections of consistency designed to make readers believe their morning sheets are computer-standardised, not written in an almighty rush by human beings. What's the point, especially in an age where hundreds of blogs appended to original articles go through no such mills?

But maybe the most irritating style point of the lot bounces out yet again from a Guardian column by Hadley Freeman disclosing "The ugly truth about female actors in rom-coms". Female actors? There used to be a perfectly good word to describe everyone from Edith Evans to Marilyn Monroe. Nothing demeaning or sexist: they were actresses. Clark Gable and Richard Burton were actors. Why on earth erase that basic difference and, worse, have to resort to a two-word duff construct when one does far better?

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