British ABC Has No Plans To Combine Print And Online Figures

Following last week’s announcement that the American ABC is to produce a single combined figure for newspaper and online readership, the British ABC has said that it has no plans to follow suit.

The US ABC board has agreed to add an estimated integrated readership figure to its official circulation reports from November this year (see US ABC Counts Print And Online Figures Into Official Circulation).

However, speaking to MediaGuardian.co.uk, Chris Boyd, chief executive of the British ABC, said that there are currently no plans to add a similar figure to audit certificates in Britain.

Boyd said: “We’re still in a guessing period but we’ll be looking at this with interest.

“We could move to this if it proves to be a useful model. What advertisers really want are hard stats, and online you can get hard stats but buyers all have their own, different ways of justifying how they spend their clients’ money.

“My inkling is that out of this, we might find something like the NRS figure used as it used to be with print, so we get a panel-based topline figure underscored by hard data that’s as accurate as we can be.”

Boyd recently spoke to NewsLine about the future of cross-platform accountability and the ABC’s Group Product Report, which lists print, online and event data in one document, but does not combine figures (see Measuring Today’s Evolving Media).

ABC: 01442 870 800 www.abc.org.uk