emma and Roy Morgan Figures Wide Apart

emma, Australia's new industry-backed newspaper and magazine readership survey, has published its first figures, which show substantially larger audiences - for most publications - than the metrics produced by Roy Morgan.

emma's stats show The Sydney Morning Herald with a combined monthly print and online audience of 4.23m and The Daily Telegraph of 3.95m, respectively 27.7 and 49.6 per cent up on the Roy Morgan figures. National publications The Australian and The Australian Financial Review do particularly well with the former's audience last month estimated at 2.97m, up from Roy Morgan's 1.8m (up 65%), and the latter up from 608,000 to 1.3m, a massive hike of 113%.

Results for magazines were more mixed with some titles seeing drops in ratings and others large rises.

Reaction to the large differences is mixed, with some jubilant and some sceptical.

Newspaper www.theaustralian.com.au , under the headline 'Reader Reality Delivered At Last', notes that 'The industry-backed survey... almost doubles the reader numbers for some mastheads compared with the decades-old metric provided by Roy Morgan Research.' Greg Hywood, CEO of publishing group Fairfax, said in a statement: 'EMMA has shown what we have known for some time - that our readers are highly engaged and loyal to Fairfax mastheads, with many exclusively engaging with Fairfax across platforms.'

Others are raising eyebrows at the multipliers emma uses to estimate readership from circulation. For most national newspapers, the new survey assumes an average of 3.9 readers per copy on weekday newspapers, 2.7 on Saturday papers and 2.4 on Sunday, while for magazines the multiple is 6.0 for weekly and 6.9 for monthly (thanks to www.mumbrella.com.au for this and other analysis in this article).

Media writer Tim Burrowes, in an article on Mumbrella entitled 'I'm Not Sure About Emma', comments: 'it now becomes a question of sanity checking the results by comparing the numbers to circulation. And there are some quirks, to say the least... How about Cosmopolitan (which did not have a great audit result)? The audited circulation was 98,294. The claimed readership? 490,000. .. that's about 4.9 readers per copy.' Discussing the print-only figures, so as to remove some of the potential grey areas, he continues: 'EMMA attributes the Sydney Morning Herald with a print edition readership of 814,000. That's compared to a Monday to Friday circulation of 141,699 - which implies that an impressive 5.7 people are reading each copy . No wonder I can never find mine if I leave it on my desk for a moment. If I leave mine at home, that means somebody else is going to have to share it with 9.4 other people that day.'

emma will be available monthly from November, and better comparative data between it and the Roy Morgan figures will be available in six months' time. For the moment, at least it's good to have two sets of figures to compare - and interesting that, as so often seems to happen with audience stats (see here for old comScore vs Hitwise comparison for example), the two come out so differently.

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.

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