The compilation of audience and viewer figures in the media industry is baffling to many. In this guide we have tried to explain how some of these figures are calculated with our opinion on the benefits and drawbacks of the methods used.
Let us first start by stating that this is as much for our benefit as it is for you. Luxurious Magazine® looks to publish audience figures that are independent and not compiled by ourselves. As Europe’s (currently, likely the world’s) most viewed privately owned media brand on Google Plus (marginally behind the BBC), we can proudly lay claim to having one of the largest online media audiences in the world having had our articles viewed over 550,000,000 times on that platform.
It is indisputable that we have an audience of 100,000’s of people each day looking at the work we publish, and this frequently increases to millions of people. It is when we hear figures proclaimed by other media brands that are estimated or blatantly untrue that we feel a clear explanation as to how these figures are derived needs to be provided.
Online Figures
This is probably the main area where many media brands make unrealistic claims. Unless you can see the figures with your own eyes or are able to view them live then as far as we are concerned they should be taken with a ‘pinch of salt’. If we take Facebook for example, the ‘Likes’ which a page has generated does not tell the whole story. Many people look at this number and make a presumption that this is the size of the audience, unfortunately this is not the case. There are many people with a pool of people who you can pay and they will get that pool of people to ‘like’ your page to create a false impression of popularity. One method used by brands is to offer incentives such as discounts and competitions if you ‘like’ their page resulting again in an inflated number. As many regular Facebook users are aware, you can stop receiving updates in your new stream from these brands, however the initial ‘like’ remains on the page.
An example of the large differences between number of Facebook ‘likes’ and actual interaction can be seen on probably the world’s most famous high-end luxury automotive manufacturers official page. They have a huge total of 3,821,745 total page likes but when you delve deeper, you’ll find that there is only 36,235 ‘People Talking About This’ (Data compiled 12/7/2015). This number represents less than 1% of the total number of ‘likes’.
At Luxurious Magazine® aside from the content we publish, we do not offer any incentives to follow us, do not ask people to follow us or use any other methods to create inflated numbers, what you see on all of our platforms is organically grown. It is the same for other platforms such as Twitter, we do not play the ‘Follow me and we will follow you’ game, this is another technique used by a number of high profile brands to increase an audience size. Ask yourself this “What is the point?” all that this will achieve is a large audience that has little or no interest in what you offer.
Radio and TV audience figures
The compilation of audience sizes for these mediums are in our opinion very inaccurate and at best a general estimate. If we take radio audience figures in the UK, the main body that compiles these statistics is RAJAR and they provide statistics for 310 UK radio stations including the BBC. The way the audience sizes are compiled is by way of a poll. To obtain their number, each week over 2,000 people are recruited by interviewers from Ipsos-MORI to complete a RAJAR diary. These people are chosen at random within carefully selected areas to ensure that the survey is completely representative in terms of the type of people who participate and the areas where they live. This is (in general) a similar method used to predict the outcome of the UK general election and whether the Greek people would accept the bailout terms offered to them, as you are probably aware, the actual results were significantly different to the estimated prediction. On the subject of radio, consider this – when you are driving in your car how many times do you re-tune to a different station due to loss of signal or wanting to listen to something else? Would you (as an individual) on that single journey count as a listener for every station that you tuned into even if it was for a matter of seconds?
TV audience sizes are also estimated and the numbers are provided by the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (BARB). BARB is jointly owned by the BBC, the TP companies, Channel 4, Channel 5, BSkyB, and the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. BARB’s current research contracts have been awarded to three different market research companies: RSMB, Ipsos MORI, and Kantar Media.
To summarise, we are not interested in ‘best guesses, approximations or self generated numbers’ we are only interested in true independent numbers that can clearly show each time a human individual looks at one’s work. It is entirely up to you to decide what numbers you want to believe or choose to use, all we can do to assist you is by asking you to go to Google Plus and look for any brand of any type in the world that has been viewed more times than Luxurious Magazine®.
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