ET readership crosses 1 million per day mark

NEW DELHI: A million-plus readers every day; 27,000 new readers added in one quarter; attracting more and more young, urban, affluent readers — that’s the progress report on your favourite newspaper and India’s premier business daily, The Economic Times, which has bucked the overall trend of challenging times for newspaper readership.The second quarter Indian Readership Survey (IRS) 2019 showed more than 1 million read ET every day, a metric called the average issue readership (AIR).ET’s AIR has grown by 27,000 from the first quarter. The affluent youth quotient is high among ET readers. Among daily readers, over 65,000 new, young readers (less than 40 years) picked up the newspaper between Q1 and Q2. Half of these were in B-schools to early-corporate life age band of 20-29 years.70694469 It gets better. ET’s total readership (TR), defined as the number of people who have read the newspaper at least once in the previous 30 days, is inching close to 4 million. And 800,000 new readers have come to the ET fold between IRS 2017 and IRS 2019 Q2.Overall, daily readership in the business newspaper category declined, making reader endorsement of ET even more impressive. ET’s position as India’s fourth-largest English language newspaper is clearly strengthened. And it is first in the business paper category by a huge distance — at 1.01 million readers, ET’s daily readership is 75% more than the combined readership of Business Standard, Mint and Hindu Business Line. Mint’s readership declined by 10%, Hindu Business Line held on to its readership and Business Standard registered an increase.ET’s growth and continued dominance show once again that if the newspaper brand is valued by readers, the credibility of the print media is never in question.The Times of India added 140,000 readers over the previous quarter even as non-Times Group newspapers together lost 180,000 readers during the period. The IRS data shows TOI has an AIR of 6.04 million.The Times Group’s Mumbai Mirror is in the fifth spot with 820,000 readers — an addition of 20,000 readers over IRS Q1.A Positive PictureAshish Bhasin, CEO (Greater South), and chairman & CEO (India), Dentsu Aegis Network, said the data is “certainly showing” a very different picture from the “gloom and doom” about the newspaper industry.Rohit Dokania, senior VP for research at IDFC Securities, said, “The data once again shows that in India, print (media) is here to stay. While globally there is a major decline in print, India is clearly bucking that trend. Growth in total readership shows that more people (including young readers) are sampling the medium. But converting total readership into daily readership is the real test.”IRS research is based on a rolling average of data from the last two quarters of 2017, and the first two quarters of 2019. As per IRS definition, data for the two 2019 quarters have come from sampling done in the November 2018-April 2019 and April-July 2019 periods.Drilled down data on readership shows how India’s most prosperous and its most dynamic young are joining the ET fold. In terms of socio-economic clusters, the biggest gains are concentrated in the NCCS A1 category (52,000 new daily readers). Young readers in Bengaluru and Mumbai have contributed the most to additional daily readership, followed by Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune and Kolkata.Thank you, dear reader, for reposing your faith in us once again. ET promises to try and serve you better.

from Economic Times https://ift.tt/2KDkcGx