• by October 24, 2005

SPEED READING -- At a time when the print world is struggling with ways of improving its audience measurement and reporting methods, its next big hope may come not from print media but from something dubbed a dot-com. Print media stalwart Rebecca McPheters, who just happens to be one of the smartest people we know on the subject of magazine audience measurement, has just launched readership.com, a new business that will provide advertisers, agencies and publishers with what she claims will be "near real-time" information about the readership of magazines. Not just the estimated size of their audiences, but increasingly important metrics such as "reader engagement," and how much of the audience was derived from single copy newsstand sales vs. paid, free or discounted subscriptions. Importantly, McPheters says she will provide this information continuously, on-demand and on an issue-by-issue basis. Wow!

Among other things, we have to say we admire McPheters' decision to use a dot-com name. It says two things: 1) That we're so far from the dot-com bust that it's now once again fashionable for other media to glom onto the Web; and 2) That the future of print and online media are inexorably entwined.

But the launch of readership.com is more than just symbolic. It's one more indication that people are finally growing tired of the status quo of print planning and buying practices that predate not just the Internet, but the birth dates of most of today's media planners.

We heard as much from Jack Kliger, president-CEO of Hachette Filipacchi Media U.S. and newly installed chairman of the Magazine Publishers of America, during his rousing keynote at the MPA's recent American Magazine Conference, where he essentially called on the industry to finally drop its archaic circulation audits process and move on to some really good magazine readership initiatives. It's not that audits are so bad. At least not if they're done right. It's just that they tend to measure the wrong thing--subscriptions and single-copy sales--when advertisers and agencies ultimately are buying total audience. Audits are also painfully after-the-fact, verifying the circulation of magazines long after many print ad campaigns have already run.

So it's no surprise that Kliger is one of the magazine leaders backing McPheters' new project. Companies that support readership.com include Conde Nast, Time Inc., Meredith, Parade and TV Guide, and at least one big media agency: Starcom USA. Let's hope the rest of Madison Avenue gets behind it, too.