The politics of media metrics override its robustness as a measure

What will it take to rid media metrics from the politics of the industry they cater to?

“HT rubbishes TOI’s claims” says the mailer sent out last week. It claims that on the metric that matters, Average Issue Readership (AIR), Hindustan Times is the most read paper in Mumbai plus Delhi NCR (National Capital Region) going by the Indian Readership Survey 2017 (IRS) released earlier this month. Going by the advert HT’s AIR for its main paper is 1.67 million while TOI’s is 1.19 million in Delhi. On Mumbai plus Delhi combined HT is at 2.43 million while TOI is 2.24 million. However, the ad doesn’t give HT’s Mumbai readership figure separately. A quick calculation makes it clear that HT leads in Delhi and TOI in Mumbai.

The advert is an illustration of the trouble with IRS 2017 or with any metric that the Rs 1,262-billion Indian media and entertainment industry deals with — cherry-picking of data and whole ego trip around being the number one in this market or that segment. The politics of getting the metric out ends up overriding its robustness as a measure.

In digital there still isn’t any third-party metric that everyone accepts. It took decades to get the TV industry to accept and work with a robust metric without fighting with the ratings body. Both regulatory intervention and the fact that TV is a largely professionally run industry helped. India’s Rs 303.30-billion print industry is older and is largely run by owner-managers. So egos tend to get rubbed the wrong way with even a little movement in the readership rankings. That is partly why there has been no readership data for four years now. 

The backdrop — readership is the currency used to buy and sell Rs 201 billion worth of print ad space. In 2012 the methodology behind IRS was overhauled to make it tech-savvy and wider. Its early 2014 results raised hackles all around because of errors and allegations of tampering. Even after a process audit cleared the data in August 2014, publishers refused to accept it. The buzz was that many of the English and Hindi papers were spooked by the slowing in readership that the figures showed.

It has taken three years to reach this far. “When we started a lot of groundwork was done to align publishers and ensure that they participated at all points,” says I Venkat, member, Audit Bureau of Circulations. There are scores of new checks and balances that make the survey virtually tamper-proof this time and at about 320,000 the sample is larger. The methodology remains the same as in 2014.

The changes in the data cuts and the information shared with media speak volumes of what must have happened behind the scenes. For example, there is an emphasis on Total Readership (readership in the last one month) which is usually three-four times more than AIR (yesterday’s readership), the standard used by advertisers. Going by Total Readership there are over 385 million Indians who read a daily newspaper against 276 million in 2014 — an increase of about 109 million readers or 40 per cent. However, AIR shows growth at 0.6 per cent over 2014 to a total of 173 million readers. Look at it another way. The Times of India has 13 million readers (overall) if you use TR but 4.76 million by AIR. Going by AIR English newspapers would have shown a decline and Hindi and other languages some slowing down, say analysts. (Note that overall, print remains a growing, profitable industry in India)

The other changes — three-day and seven-day readership measures, separate metrics for the main paper and its variants. This gives the buyer four ways of looking at readership. More than two weeks after the IRS data is out there have been no protests from publishers, no court cases etc. The trauma of not having a metric plus demonetisation hit listed print players hard. Many of them were instrumental in pushing for these changes, to better reflect the fragmented reality of reading in India, say insiders. This time it looks like IRS will sail.

Whether the changes mean a more efficient metric is moot.