When is a reader not a reader? When he's THREE readers at the NYT
With an 18 percent gain in daily circulation,The New York Times has shot past USA Today to become the second-largest U.S. newspaper, with a combined figure for online and print of 1.87 million, we learned today.That seems simple enough - but there is a question.
Mark Thompson:Digital drive at NYT
Figures from the US Alliance for Audited Media - formerly the Audit Bureau of Circulations - show the Times reached this average daily circulation in the six-month period ending March 31.
But, said Bloomberg, the company was helped by relatively new reporting rules at the AAM, that let publishers count subscribers multiple times if they read a paper on different devices.
For instance, a person who accesses the Times on a personal computer, a smartphone and a tablet in a single day would be counted as three readers. That really had me scratching my head. How can one person be three readers?
A spokeswoman for the AAM told the Drum, "These rules for digital circulation were agreed by our board in October 2010. If a newspaper charges 5% extra for each device , they are entitled to count that as an extra subscriber."
News Corp.’s Wall Street Journal remained the No. 1 paper in the U.S., with its circulation (print and digital)climbing 12 percent to 2.38 million.
The Gannett Co.-owned USA Today dropped to third after daily readership slipped 7.9 percent to 1.67 million.Its website is still free.
All these figures pale beside those for the UK's Mail Online with 9,005,251 unique browsers worldwide in a single day in January.
Mail Online now has a substantial US presence. The site's average of 7,977,039 unique browsers every day was 38% higher than in January 2012.
Of course the Mail Online is not paid-for (yet) but it will be very interesting to see how it performs on a paid-for basis.
Daily readership of U.S. newspapers altogether declined 0.7 percent in the six-month period from a year earlier . Sunday editions, which draw most advertising dollars, were down 1.4 percent, according to the AAM.
Even so, news online accounts for 19 percent of total circulation, compared with 14 percent last year.
The New York Times figures include people who read the paper on a range of devices, including Amazon’s Kindle.
“These gains can largely be attributed to the continuing popularity of the Times’ digital subscription packages,” said the New York Times in a separate statement. But how many of these readers are one person masquerading as three?
The Times’ current pricing plans range from $15 to $35 a month, depending on how many devices the reader plans to use.