How do circulation measurement and audience measurement work together?
Circulation will always have a role because magazines have to document that they are selling copies. However, magazines have to compete against other media, and they have to compete on common metrics. There is no such thing as circulation for TV or the Internet — what you are looking at is actual viewers or hits. To that degree, circulation measurement has to take something of a backseat to audience measurement if magazines are going to compete successfully. Q: Has your data collection method changed over the years? A: It has changed. The foundation study for MRI is conducted in-person with 26,000 subjects a year. But that does not get to the granularity of issue-specific data or noting the ads in the magazine. For that reason, we have added Internet surveys — 300,000 to 400,000 a year — to augment the in-person survey. Q: What is the next step for magazine measurement? A: We introduced “Admeasure” in June, which is a measurement of the number of people who note the ads within a partic
