Return to Roy Morgan for Australian Publishers

A rift in the Australian readership measurement industry which opened a dozen years ago appears to be healing this week, as media alliance Think News Brands shutters its publisher-funded 'EMMA' measurement platform and resumes support for long-time currency provider Roy Morgan.

Industry consortium The Newspaper Works (later The Readership Works / TRW) set out a tender for a new look measurement service in August 2009, turning its back on Roy Morgan who refused to take part in the process and immediately won the backing of publishing giant ACP, responsible for half the magazines in Australia. Ipsos was chosen a year later to develop and run the new survey, later christened EMMA (Enhanced Media Metrics Australia), while Roy Morgan continued with its existing Single Source survey. The two immediately produced widely differing figures and disagreement about the relevance of each approach has continued ever since. Three years ago TRW selected Ipsos to run EMMA for another five years, now fusing the findings with further digital ratings data from Nielsen.

Think News Brands was founded by Australian media owners News Corp, Nine Entertainment Co and Seven West Media, to promote advertising alongside premium news content; and has been running EMMA, but will drop it in favour of Roy Morgan's 'Total News' metric, from 1st July this year, after working with the latter firm to enhance its methodology across print and digital news formats. The alliance said it had 'listened to the industry and acknowledged the need to implement a single unified readership metric for total news, produced by one entity rather than with multiple data sources'. Quoted on www.mumbrella.com.au , Vanessa Lyons (pictured), recently appointed GM of ThinkNewsBrands said EMMA would be 'retired, just over half way through its five year extension with the two market research firms'; and that 'all involved parties' have now approved the use of the single measurement currency.

With the country's magazine audit system all but shuttered after major publisher defections in December 2016, and the AMAA newspaper audit also hit hard in December 2017, focus on EMMA and Roy Morgan figures has intensified.

In a statement, Think News Brands said it would 'continue to release quarterly readership data, now termed Total News, in conjunction with Roy Morgan, with the first data release scheduled for August' but reassured that 'Current users of EMMA will retain access to historical data to conduct comparative analysis where required'.

Also this week, Nielsen has 'soft-launched' its new Digital Media Ratings in Australia, but the IAB has said that at this stage it will not endorse the figures, with more work still to be done - DRNO will cover this story in more detail on Monday.

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