Tag Archives: NADBank

NADbank numbers: Journal, free dailies gain readers

October 8, 2010 – 1:25 am| Posted in Media, Montreal

The latest NADbank newspaper readership numbers have been released, and as you can imagine it's fantastic news for every news agency with the ability to spin:

  • Halifax: Metro has a 20% increase in daily readership.
  • Montreal: The Journal has had "spectacular" growth, with 58% more readers than its closest competitor La Presse and 64% market share.
  • Ottawa: The Sun's readership has "skyrocketed", with Saturday readership up 43%. Metro's readership is up 22%.
  • Toronto: The Sun is "the fastest growing paid English language daily newspaper in Canada", with 19.5% growth since the last full survey, far outgrowing its competition. The Star, meanwhile, clobbers its competition by a factor of more than 2:1 in readership, reaching more than half of the GTA's adult population.
  • Edmonton: The Journal's online readership has jumped 21 per cent since the last survey, and weekday print readership has shown "stability." Metro has gained momentum with the second-highest growth increase.
  • Calgary: Metro is the fastest-growing daily newspaper in Canada.
  • Vancouver: The Sun's online readership jumped 19 per cent in the past year. Metro has a lot of "traction" in its key demographic.

Of course, it's all about selective cherrypicking of numbers:

  • Readership numbers down but you're still No. 1? Don't talk about growth, and concentrate on how X% of the market is choosing you
  • Still far behind the big players in a market? Talk about how fast you're growing, and leave out how your competitor still has twice as many readers.
  • Print readership numbers suck? Point to the online numbers. Compare those to 2007 if necessary.
  • Numbers stagnant? Talk about "stability" and imply you're ahead of the curve that is quickly leading to the extinction of newspapers.
  • Still nothing? Focus on some key demographic - young adults are the best - to show how the cool people choose your product.
  • Little exciting news about your paper? Focus on the national scene and what the numbers show nationwide for online vs. print readership.

Montreal numbers

Infopresse has the numbers for Montreal (PDF) as part of its analysis. Here they are compared to last year at this time, using five-day cumulative numbers:

2009 2010 Difference
Journal de Montréal 1,027,400 1,124,700 +9.5%
La Presse 678,200 650,100 -4.1%
Métro 630,100 688,800 +9.3%
24 Heures 516,400 561,900 +8.8%
The Gazette 454,200 442,600 -2.6%

Of note here:

  • The Journal de Montréal continues to gain readers despite its lockout. This is being explained as more papers being given away free or cheap (this survey measures audience, not subscribers or subscription revenue).
  • Métro has replaced La Presse as the No. 2 paper on weekdays. When you consider on-island readership (this survey covers the entire region), the difference is even greater.
  • Online readership is mostly stable for all five (down slightly for The Gazette/La Presse, up slightly for the rest). La Presse kills in this category, with 330,300 weekly readers, more than twice that of the Journal and The Gazette. In fact, it's slightly more than all the other four combined.
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Shockingly, people still reading newspapers

September 23, 2009 – 10:28 pm| Posted in Media

NADbank, the national newspaper readership monitoring service, released a report on Wednesday with some new numbers (PDF) for newspaper publishers to chew on. And, of course, with all the data there, each newspaper cherry-picks facts to make it look like they're doing better than their competitors:

So what do the numbers show?

For the sake of comparison, I'm using the "five-day cumulative" number, which measures how many people read the newspaper (in printed form) at least once over the previous five weekdays. The numbers are compared to the last annual report released in March.

  • Journal de Montréal: 1,027,400, up 3.3% from 994,600 despite the lockout
  • La Presse: 678,200, up 0.9% from 672,300
  • Metro: 630,100, up 2.0% from 617,900
  • The Gazette: 454,200, down 1.1% from 459,200
  • 24 Heures: 516,400, up 13.9% from 453,200

Note that no numbers are given for Le Devoir.

The big news here is with 24 Heures, which has shown a huge jump in readership, surpassing The Gazette for fourth place in the market overall.  This is most likely due to more aggressive distribution as well as the increased number of journalists now employed by the paper since the Journal de Montréal was locked out. It also may have picked up some former ICI readers, since ICI is now a weekly supplement in 24 Heures.

For online readership, the numbers are all press-release-worthy:

  • La Presse (cyberpresse.ca): 359,000, up 10% from 326,200
  • The Gazette (montrealgazette.com): 134,900, up 6.5% from 126,700
  • Metro (journalmetro.com): 36,900, up 12.2% from 32,900
  • 24 Heures (24hmontreal.canoe.ca): 27,100, up 24.3% from 21,800

NADbank is also, for the first time, counting Journal de Montréal online readership (the Journal doesn't have its own website, but Canoe groups some of its articles on a page here). It measures weekly readership at a paltry 130,700, just a bit less than The Gazette.

It's unsurprising that online has grown quite a bit (in most cases it really has nowhere to go but up), and while Metro and 24 Heures have seen huge gains percentagewise, their numbers are still so small that NADbank puts an asterisk next to them to indicate the sample size was too small to be reliable.

Speaking of small sample sizes, the numbers also include Montreal readership for the Globe and Mail (97.600 Monday-Friday, 79,800 weekly online) and National Post (71,400 Monday-Friday, 41,100 weekly online).

So I guess the newspaper crisis is over, huh?

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Canadian newspaper readership stable

March 25, 2009 – 3:28 pm| Posted in Media

It seems to go against conventional wisdom, but NADBank results released this morning show that readership at major Canadian newspapers remains stable, with three quarters of Canadians reading at least one daily newspaper each week. Online numbers also remain stable, which is disappointing because they represent so little.

Both the Toronto Star and Globe and Mail cherry-picked results to declare victory. The Star has more print readers on a daily, Saturday and weekly basis, but the Globe has more online readers and a higher total readership of both online and print (the Globe also says it won "key" demographics and implies that its readers are smarter). Other newspapers trumpeted their gains, especially the Calgary Herald, whose readership jumped 7% over last year,

In Montreal, the Journal de Montréal is still the undisputed print leader, with 578,800 having read it "yesterday" and 1,129,600 in the last week, 40% more than second-place La Presse (even throwing in Cyberpresse readers, against the Journal's lack of a website, the paper still comes up short). Note that this is all before the lockout.

For those who care about comparing competing papers, there's not much new here. The market percentages are almost identical to last year. A slight uptick in online readers for Cyberpresse, but only from 9% to 11% of the market.

In terms of raw numbers:

  • The Journal de Montréal lost about 3% of its weekday and Sunday readers.
  • La Presse lost about 30,000 weekly print readers but gained about 26,000 weekly online readers.
  • The Gazette (my paper) gained modestly in all categories, but online growth is robust, rising 11% since it relaunched its website last fall. In the Greater Montreal Area, it rose 31%. (Still, most of the website's traffic comes from outside Quebec, an oddity among Canwest's papers)
  • Metro lost almost 5% of its weekly readers, and though it gained almost 20% online, its web readership is still negligible.
  • 24 Heures gained 2.4% in weekly readers (perhaps partially at Metro's expense). Its online numbers are similarly negligible.

In general, 49% of Montrealers 18 and over read a newspaper on the average weekday, 74% read at least one a week, and 76% read a newspaper or go to a newspaper's website in a week (which means a tiny number - 4% nationally - go to newspaper websites but don't subscribe). Freebie newspaper readership is at 24% here, with 717,000 people having read either Metro or 24 Heures in the past five weekdays.

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