The blind state of media metrics: Publishers unfazed by lack of data

The Indian newspaper business is doing well. DB Corp, the publishers of Danik Bhaskar among other brands, posted an Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation) of ₹703 crore on revenues of ₹2,482 crore in the financial year ended March 2024. That is a 28 per cent gross margin in a business that, in most parts of the world, is in decline. Much like DB Corp, across the board, newspaper publishers have had a good couple of years, thanks to falling newsprint prices and rising ad revenues.

 

That seems strange. The last Indian Readership Survey was done in 2019. There has been no readership data for five years now. The data on circulation or copies sold has become irrelevant since publishers jump in and out of surveys, depending on which edition or market they want to pump up or hide. How then are advertisers using newspapers? What are they basing their expenditure on if there are no metrics?

 

This brings us to the point of this column.

 

What is true for newspapers is also true, in varying degrees, for television, digital, radio, and other media. Across the ₹2.3 trillion Indian media and entertainment business, advertisers, media buyers, and analysts are operating in a blind state.

 

Somewhere in 2022 the Broadcast Audience Research Council (Barc) stopped sharing any data with the media. Its subscribers — broadcasters, advertisers, and media agencies — continue to get data. There are some numbers available on its website, but if you wanted to do a trend analysis or cut across regions, languages, or genres, things got tougher. At ₹69,600 crore in revenues in 2023, television is the largest part of the media and entertainment business. It needs to be analysed. Most of us get the numbers we want from friendly media agencies but that is not a sustainable way to analyse such a large business.

 

If you think digital is the cat’s whiskers, think again. For years Barc tried to put together a cross-media metric that would generate the blended viewership of, say, Star Plus on linear plus online, on Disney+Hotstar, YouTube, etc. But it did not work out because the parties involved simply couldn’t agree.

 

On pure-play digital, there is Comscore, Nielsen, App Annie, SimilarWeb, and others. But many of the major apps and sites do not allow third-party measurement. Try getting a list of the top 10 streaming brands that everyone agrees on and has no caveats; it is impossible. Advertisers simply accept the numbers Google (YouTube) and Meta (Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram) claim. Online, supposedly the most transparent medium, is a dark data hole.

 

Advertisers pay six times as much to reach every thousand people reading a newspaper as against what they pay to reach them online. On TV they would pay four times as much as digital, going by the January 2024 data from media agency Lodetsar UM. Without decent third-party metrics, can digital match the ad rates that print or TV get even if it crosses them on reach or revenue? Note that even though print has no metrics currently, much of the spend is based on past figures and extrapolations thereof.

 

Newspaper publishers are sanguine about the lack of readership data. They reckon, rightly, that if Google or Meta is not asked to certify or audit their numbers, why should publishers. Besides, for many large newspapers such as Malayala Manorama or Dainik Bhaskar three-fourths of the advertising revenue comes from local retailers in the cities and towns their papers sell in. The retailers advertise because they get a response to the advert on the same day. And typically the top two newspapers in a city are the ones with the best response.

 

More than a decade ago, the bulk of the newspaper advertising came from “national advertisers”, who wanted a pan-Indian reach. In many ways then the lack of metrics has made newspapers like digital — performance-oriented, local ad vehicles. The lack of numbers joins home delivery and low cover prices to ensure that Indian newspapers remain a robust business even while the American market had been decimated to less than half its size two decades ago.

 

The absence of metrics has been tougher on TV. If Barc’s blended metric had been up and running, you would have seen that over half of what Indians watch on streaming is catchup TV — that mainstream films are a huge chunk of streaming viewership. But this composite picture, which can hold back the decline in revenues for television, is simply not available.

 

Traditionally media metrics have been taken seriously in India. Readership surveys for print began in 1974. The diary method of measuring TV ratings began in 1983. Then came electronic ratings with TAM in 1991. This meant that advertisers could see the medium’s growth and invest in it. Programmers knew what was working and what was not. Now it has become a fuzzy area. To this add another issue — India has not had a Census since 2011. All the number-crunching across the smorgasbord of media research is based on extrapolations of the 2011 Census. It was not refreshed in 2021 because of the pandemic. In the media and entertainment business then, advertising spending is a case of the blind leading the blind.

 

Maybe newspaper publishers are right — if the biggest platforms and advertisers don’t give a damn about data, why should publishers?

 

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