Doubts over newspaper readerships in the UK

Manfred Mareck

This article discusses magazine readership research. Average issue readership (AIR) remains the preferred currency on which magazines are bought, in spite of much criticism over the past 30 years.

Doubts over newspaper readerships in the UK

Manfred Mareck

With accountability and demands for ROI measures still de rigueur, I sometimes wonder why magazines still attract advertising. Their base metric is 'average issue reach' (AIR), which estimates how many people have read any issue during a title's most recent publishing interval. There are many well-documented problems with AIR and I have lost count of the number of presentations defending (or attacking) this practice over the past 30 years. So far, few attempts have been made to come up with anything better.

Some years ago, Mediamark Research and Intelligence (MRI), which...

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