Covert

To be fair to MJ, at least he made sure that his new magazine has a functional website where you can go read the stories to get suitably bored. Then again, going through the stories these guys seem to veering further left of Outlook, the cover is a suitably vicious hachet job on Sharad Pawar. At least, and I repeat, they have a fully functional website (simple, but functional) unlike Sakaal Times or Financial Chronicle.
But here is the problem, Covert (and their Covert funders) does not have the distribution muscle of either the India Today Group or the Outlook Group (of course, those who claim to know Covert's funding sources claim otherwise, though magazines are quite a different commondity for what is usually distributed). And despite that, both IT English and Outlook have seen drops in readership in the IRS R1. India Today English, for example has seen 'Claimed Readership' (CR) decline 4 per cent to about 6.9 million readers. Keep in mind, Claimed Readership and Average Issue Readership (AIR) are two quite different things, calculated in different ways (we'll get to that some other time). The same survey shows Outlook CR declined 10 per cent, to around 1.9 million readers.
The truth of the matter is that while hundreds of new magazines are being launched, magazine readership is declining, even the publication I work for saw a decline, not as scary as the 21 per cent decline for Cosmopolitan, but decline none the less, in fact, lifestyle magazines registered some really scary numbers. And the IRS does not even include many of the new-fangled publications which would barely register a blip, such as those published by the Ponytail (who seems to be skipping salaries). I've gone through the numbers and declining readership copupled with rising newsprint costs and the rise of the internet, is not going to make for a pretty time very soon.

Don’t trust readership surveys.

Whenever someone from within journalism writes on readership surveys the first response is to accuse the writer of having an ‘interest’ in the piece. Your result was very good or very bad, otherwise you won’t write. But, I am not because our results are bad but because surveys are extremely flawed, and I will use the example not of the publication I work for but for the publication which claims to be our ‘biggest’ rival.
Let us call this magazine W. Now, in the first survey that came out a couple of months ago, W had a readership of around 650K. They promptly proclaimed themselves #1 in their space (albeit by a very small margin) and didn’t give a damn that deeper digging into the results showed that almost three-quarters of their readers didn’t ‘own’ their copies. Anyway, it has to be said that their product is better than what it was earlier, and they had made significant gains. That said, the organizers of the first survey claim that there might have been a sampling error regarding us.
But, the surprise came in the second survey. My publication, which we will call T saw readership quite similar to the first survey, in fact more or less the same, which kinda works. W on the other hand saw the second survey give it a readership of 240K and a third magazine, which I will call I saw readership go from 300K in one survey to 500K in another. Now, these two results made me become very skeptical of surveys, not that I wasn’t earlier. But a 400,000 variation is a bit weird for anyone.
I mean, there are broad trends can be sensed from reading survey numbers – magazines are steady (slightly down), ET is declining even more (which says a lot about the product) and at least one business daily claims to have a circulation higher than its readership in BOTH surveys – now that as someone described was akin to someone shutting their eyes, buying the papers and then cleaning their bums after a shit. Even though, I can pretty much testify from personal experience that newsprint is a very bad substitute for TP.
Anyway, the problem therefore is what can you trust? Which survey can you trust? I mean in Delhi, one survey says ToI leads by 100K another gives HT a similar lead. The problem is that surveys tend to be conducted by a bunch of idiots, who put up logos and ask you if you have read that particular publication at all in the previous XX months. While that works for a magazine, even if I happened to read a particular paper once in three months, and that too not out of choice, I will be counted as a reader, I don’t think that is very accurate, would you?
Anyway, at the end of the day, my publication pulls in two-thirds of all the ad-revenue in the segment, so really readership surveys or not, we make a ton of money and as someone said, that is what really matters right now. But, honestly, there needs to be a significant overhul in the way readership surveys are conducted in India, firstly I believe that we should have one independent survey rather than two 'competing' surveys and there also needs to be a major overhaul of the methodology, so that large widespread marketing and advertising campaigns which are timed to coincide with surveys get negated. Anyway, these are just my two little itsy-bitsy paise on the topic.
On another note, traffic has collapsed all over Delhi today, I'm still sitting in office too scared to face the traffic.