One final word on the impact of print in all forms:
You also need to consider the ‘value’ of a reader as opposed to treating all readers as equal. A print reader is a different type of beast. If you’re an online reader you’re likely a fast scroller, you like to click around, you most likely have another tab running in the background, and you want to get in and out because something else is calling you. Bounce rates and session times on websites are incredibly low for the most part, particularly news sources compared to retail and e-commerce. A print reader, however, is far more invested. They’re there to consume, to absorb and to spend time with the content presented to them. They’re there for the detail, so what they read sticks with them. It doesn’t just get bounced around like a rubber ball before shooting off. It has a much higher value.
Even within print you have two parties - paid and free. If someone is handed a free magazine they’re likely to put it straight in the bin. You can hand out 500,000 copies of a free magazine and you’ll be lucky if 10% of them are read, and even then you’re probably talking a cursory flick for 30 seconds. Maybe 10% of that 10% will be genuinely absorbed, meaning you’re lucky if 500,000 handouts results in 5,000 genuine reads from front to back. I don’t think it’s even that high, personally, but that’s the top end. If someone has paid money for a publication, however, it’s because they want to actually read it. I used to work for a specialist music magazine with average sales of only 15-20,000 copies per issue, and I had countless arguments with labels and publicists because they were prioritising tiny little features in NME (after it went free and was claiming to dish out a million units per week) over giving us the access we needed for the artists’s core market. I used the same formulas I mentioned above and presented a lot of pretty compelling stats and information to back up my argument - namely that 20,000 guaranteed readers with us was worth more than a maximum of 10,000 casual NME readers, not only numerically but also because we were offering a more direct hit to those who were more likely to have an interest in the artist as a specialist title - and after a few months several labels started to see that this was true. They began running their own metrics and saw that streams and YouTube searches for said artist increased more in the first few days after they were featured in our magazine, rather than in the first few days after a free copy of NME was handed out. Again, it’s the value of the reader. They were wrong to assume that it was as simple as more people = bigger reach and bigger impact.
This same methodology also spills over into advertising. The reason that print adverts still exist is for the same reasons I outlined already - investment and conversion. If somebody has already spent money on a physical item (newspaper, magazine) then you know that they’re potentially up for spending on other physical items. You also know they’re likely to take in the information given on the ad rather than blank it out (or use an ad blocker). If 10,000 people have paid £7 to read a heavy metal magazine (and each copy is read by multiple people, don’t forget), there is a good chance that even 50 of those people might spend £20 on a special vinyl of a record by a band that is featured prominently or regularly in said publication. So it’s probably worth plonking a £500 ad in the magazine, rather than spending the same amount of money sending a digital ad that they can scroll past to their socials feeds, and that even if they take notice of might result in a couple of streams rather than a purchase, which generates basically 0p.
You can then take all of the above and apply it to information presented by tabloids and broadsheets. A print reader is consumed and invested. They aren’t scrolling or paying attention to anything else outside of those words as they’ve spent money accessing them, and they’re investing because they want to read it all and it’s going to stick with them as a result. Their value is extremely high. The Sun sells over a million copies a day and each copy is read by more than one person. That’s far more influential and has way more cut through than one page on a website full of literally thousands of other articles, with an average visitor time of 10-20 seconds. People usually search for what they want to know about online - they dictate the topic that they are interested in finding out more about and can find another source to you in seconds. In print, though,
you determine what
they will be seeing, and they’ve probably only got the one physical source in front of them. There is huge power in that.
If you’ve read all this, you’ve earned a drink. Put it on my tab. Unless you’re
@SteMerritt in which case you knew what you signed up for.
PS - give it Govey ‘til the end of the season.
