Tag Archives: NADBank

| Media

Journal de Montréal still most read in print, La Presse most read overall in Montreal

La Presse continues to be the most-read newspaper overall in Montreal even though most of its readers don’t read it on paper, the latest readership data shows.

Results were released Thursday by Vividata, which was formed by the merger of NADbank and the Print Measurement Bureau. It determines readership of newspapers and magazines by public surveys.

The top-line data from the latest survey shows La Presse has an average daily (Monday to Friday) audience just above 1 million, who read it either in print form or online.

As we saw previously with NADbank numbers, the Journal de Montréal has more readers in print than La Presse (530,000 vs. 429,000), but the latter makes up for this by having almost twice as many digital readers (858,000 vs. 473,000).

If you compare La Presse to other newspapers, you also see that few of them have anywhere near the kind of relative success that La Presse does on digital. It has exactly twice as many digital readers as print, while most other daily newspapers in Canada have fewer digital readers than print or only slightly more. The only others with a 2:1 ratio like this are the national newspapers (the Globe and Mail and National Post) and Le Devoir (whose print readership is very low).

La Presse is now third in print readership, falling below Métro and just slightly ahead of 24 Heures on the average weekday. The Montreal Gazette is fifth overall and in print, followed by Le Devoir, though the latter has a higher online readership than the Gazette.

Data for magazines is published here. Reader’s Digest remains the most read magazine in the country according to this measurement.

| Media

NADbank: La Presse has more readers overall than the Journal de Montréal

NADbank, the organization that measures newspaper readership, has come out with its mid-year national survey. Based on its large-market readership numbers:

When combining print and digital readership, La Presse and the Journal de Montréal both reach 1.241 million people a week. The difference in the official numbers is only 300, or 0.02%, which is far below the margin for error in such a survey.

Even more surprising, the daily readership of La Presse, measured by asking survey respondents which papers/websites they read the day before, is significantly higher than the Journal de Montréal, at 750,000 to 582,000.

La Presse has closed the gap with the Journal mainly through a huge increase in digital readership. The survey doesn’t distinguish between digital methods, but La Presse’s publisher Guy Crevier says this is mainly due to its now-flagship product La Presse+. Its digital readership jumped from 571,000 a week to 721,000 a week, a 26% increase.

In fact, more respondents said they read La Presse on a digital medium the day before than read the print paper. Other than the national papers Globe and Mail and National Post, no other major-market daily has more daily readers online than in print.

Even more amazing, La Presse reported slightly more daily digital readers in Montreal than the Star did in Toronto.

Excluding digital media and focusing just on print, the Journal de Montréal is still tops on weekdays and weekly, and that’s what it focused on with its press release. But on Saturday, La Presse has slightly more readers in print alone.

This dramatic increase in digital readership — and the fact that it has resulted in an increase in readership overall instead of just cannibalizing print readers — is yet another statistic justifying La Presse’s new strategy. And as if on cue, publisher Guy Crevier has another interview, in which he says 35% of La Presse’s revenues come from La Presse+, and that he doesn’t expect the print edition to still be around (at least as a daily) by 2020, or maybe even 2018.

Other facts in the NADbank numbers:

  • More than three years after 24 Heures became the official newspaper of the metro system, Métro still has more readers overall (300,000 vs. 270,000).
  • Métro and 24 Heures both get more than 90% of their readership from their print product. Their online readership is so low NADbank warns the numbers are statistically unreliable.
  • Only two papers in Montreal had more than half their weekly readers reading on any given day: La Presse and The Gazette. Readers of these publications are more likely to be everyday readers, compared to occasional readers for the others. (The Gazette has more daily readers than Métro or 24 Heures, but fewer weekly readers, because of this.)
  • More people said they read The Gazette online the previous day than the Journal de Montréal, despite the Journal’s gains online. The Gazette’s weekly online readership is up 37% from the previous report.
  • The Globe and Mail beats the National Post in both print and digital in all major markets. (In Edmonton, the Post has more daily digital readers, but fewer weekly digital readers and fewer readers overall.)
  • This isn’t new, but I just noticed it now: The Journal de Montréal has more readers in its home market than the Toronto Sun, daily and weekly.
| Media

NADbank: Journal de Montréal is still king, but…

NADbank, the company that measures newspaper readership through audience surveys, came out with its latest report recently, which on the surface doesn’t show much to write home about. Overall, the Journal de Montréal is still the most read newspaper in the metro area with 1.17 million readers, or 1.25 million if you include digital. (Quebecor has its press release crowing about this with some cherry-picked numbers, as well as some slides comparing its demographics with La Presse.)

But reading a bit deeper into the numbers and we see some interesting facts popping up.

La Presse has two and a half times the Journal’s digital readership. Two major changes explain this. First is La Presse+, the iPad app launched last year that’s the new flagship product for that company. But even with all the hype, the data shows only a 3% increase in the number of people reporting they read La Presse in a digital format in 2013. The bigger factor is a 9% drop in the Journal de Montréal’s digital readership, which is probably explained mainly by the setup of a paywall in September 2012.

Métro has more weekly print readers than La Presse. Even though La Presse’s print readership is up by 5%, Métro’s up by twice that, and can now claim to be the #2 most read newspaper in Montreal. (It already claims to be the #1 paper on the island.) Métro has 903,900 print readers a week compared to La Presse’s 879,200. And that’s with Métro putting out one fewer edition a week. But La Presse has 28% more people reporting they read that newspaper “yesterday” (i.e. the day before the survey was taken), meaning La Presse’s readership is more loyal and more interested than Métro’s.

24 Heures shows double-digit gains in print readers. Compared to 2012, 24 Heures had a great year, at least in print (and it doesn’t hesitate to tell people that). The number of people reporting having read the paper the day before shot up 25%, from 252,900 to 317,300. Weekly, the paper is up 15.5%. But three years after 24 Heures wrestled away the right to distribute its paper exclusively in the metro system, it still hasn’t managed to beat Métro in readership. Métro now has 10% more readers than 24 Heures though, and that margin is smaller than it used to be. And 24 Heures is now effectively tied with La Presse in terms of print readers on weekdays (it reports to be slightly ahead, while NADbank’s numbers report it slightly behind).

Several papers are showing double-digit drops in digital readership. Whether it’s paywalls or disinterest or something else, there’s a lot fewer people reading newspapers online. Overall, the market showed an 8% drop in weekly digital readership, while print gained 2%. Other major markets showed little change in digital readership. Here, the smaller papers took the biggest hit. 24 Heures’s digital readership is down 21%, the Globe and Mail’s is down 19%, and the National Post’s is down 18%.

As for The Gazette, the numbers put out by NADbank show modest drops across the board, though internally the paper is reporting increases, particularly in digital. Overall, it has 240,000 print readers on an average weekday and 499,000 people read it in either print or digital format every week (which I’m sure I can extrapolate into meaning that half a million people read every article I publish in that paper).

For the full numbers for each paper, you can read this chart from NADbank. The chart below shows the difference between those numbers and the previous year’s.

Change Yesterday print Yesterday total Weekday total Saturday print Sunday print Weekly print Weekly digital Total weekly
Any +2.80% -0.11% +1.67% +6.40% +4.43% +2.20% -8.39% -0.75%
La Presse +2.53% -0.54% +2.10% +8.13% +5.31% +3.24% +1.25%
Journal de Montréal +6.40% +18.13% -1.40% +17.20% +4.43% +0.52% -8.86% -1.73%
The Gazette -1.63% -1.21% -10.18% -3.39% -8.20% -0.56% -10.06%
Métro +12.59% +9.97% +11.19% +11.19% +9.17% +9.72%
24 Heures +25.46% +22.40% +15.53% +15.53% -21.56% +12.97%
Globe and Mail +11.58% -9.71% +7.63% +37.56% +5.87% -18.53% -16.40%
National Post -3.70% -20.35% +23.23% +62.35% +22.72% -18.18% -1.94%

Further reading

| Media, Montreal

NADbank: Journal still reigns as print falls and online grows

NADbank, the company that surveys newspaper readership, released its 2012 survey results on Wednesday. In general, it shows that online readership of newspapers in Canada is growing as print readership is declining, and that is reflected in the numbers for the Montreal market.

Comparing last year’s numbers to this year’s for the Montreal market, there isn’t much change. The Journal de Montréal is still tops in most categories, with La Presse behind it. And Metro still beats 24 Heures in print and online, despite the fact that 24 Heures is distributed in the metro system.

I’ve compiled the numbers into a chart below. Red shows declines in real numbers, green shows gains. Bolded numbers are where there has been a change in rank. In the first case, it shows that for average combined print and online readership on weekdays, The Gazette has gone back ahead of 24 Heures after slipping behind it last year.

The huge gains online have also shaken things up. The Journal de Montréal more than doubled its online readership in a year, bringing it ahead of The Gazette for second place (though still only about a half of La Presse), and Metro has climbed ahead of the National Post for 5th place behind the Globe and Mail.

Overall, weekday print readership has continued to decline, with four of the five local dailies showing double-digit declines. Saturday was especially bad, with declines ranging from 11% for La Presse to 31% for the National Post. But thanks to the gains in online, every paper has a larger weekly reach than it did a year ago (except The Gazette, which is exactly the same), so everyone can claim gains here.

You’ll notice that Le Devoir is not included in this chart because its numbers weren’t published by NADbank. According to the Journal de Montréal, Le Devoir had a total weekly audience of 226,900, which puts it last among the local dailies.

Newspaper readership in Montreal

Paper Any paper The Gazette Journal de Montréal La Presse Metro 24 Heures Globe and Mail National Post
Avg. weekday print 2011 1,484,100 283,300 (5th) 597,900 (1st) 436,500 (2nd) 349,700 (3rd) 312,300 (4th) 40,900* (6th) 28,200* (7th)
Avg. weekday print 2012 1,381,600 (-7%) 239,300 (-16%) 532,400 (-11%) 438,100 (+0.4%) 311,400 (-11%) 252,900 (-19%) 35,400 (-13%) 29,700 (+5%)
Avg. weekday print/digital 2011 1,594,200 308,700 (5th) 617,500 (1st) 525,600 (2nd) 352,900 (3rd) 316,800 (4th) 64,600 (6th) 31,200* (7th)
Avg. weekday print/digital 2012 1,742,900 (+9%) 298,300 (-3%) (up to 4th) 612,800 (-1%) 689,800 (+31%) 325,900 (-8%) 263,400 (-17%) (drops to 5th) 80,300 (+24%) 57,500 (+84%)
At least one weekday 2011 2,163,900 464,200 (5th) 1,077,700 (1st) 722,100 (3rd) 789,700 (2nd) 637,000 (4th) 122,000 (6th) 78,700 (7th)
At least one weekday 2012 2,124,400 (-2%) 439,900 (-5%) 1,085,400 (+0.7%) 761,200 (+5%) 812,900 (+3%) 652,800 (+2%) 108,800 (-11%) 73,600 (-6%)
Saturday print 2011 1,362,700 318,900 (3rd) 617,300 (1st) 552,400 (2nd) N/A N/A 50,200 (4th) 37,200 (5th)
Saturday print 2012 1,164,500 (-15%) 268,300 (-16%) 513,400 (-17%) 489,300 (-11%) N/A N/A 40,200 (-20%) 25,500 (-31%)
Sunday print 2011 407,900 N/A 407,900 N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Sunday print 2012 372,600 (-9%) N/A 372,600 (-9%) N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Print at least once a week 2011 2,266,400 498,000 (5th) 1,163,800 (1st) 820,100 (2nd) 789,700 (3rd) 637,000 (4th) 132,200 (6th) 84,900 (7th)
Print at least once a week 2012 2,220,500 (-2%) 465,900 (-6%) 1,164,300 (+0.04%) 834,900 (+2%) 812,900 (+3%) 652,800 (+2%) 122,700 (-7%) 77,900 (-8%)
Web at least once a week 2011 578,800 144,000 (2nd) 111,500 (3rd) 293,800 (1st) 36,300* (6th) 35,200* (7th) 78,500 (4th) 50,200 (5th)
Web/digital at least once a week 2012 1,155,600 (+100%) 177,500 (+23%) (drops to 3rd) 252,700 (+127%) (up to 2nd) 553,000 (+88%) 67,600 (+86%) (up to 5th) 50,100 (+42%) 98,200 (+25%) 61,600 (+23%) (drops to 6th)
Print or web average week 2011 2,370,800 554,800 (5th) 1,188,300 (1st) 941,200 (2nd) 796,600 (3rd) 648,200 (4th) 186,600 (6th) 117,200 (7th)
Print or web average week 2012 2,505,200 (+6%) 554,800 (unch.) 1,276,600 (+7%) 1,104,700 (+17%) 844,000 (+6%) 674,800 (+4%) 207,300 (+11%) 128,900 (+10%)

* Small sample size

We’re all number one!

And the self-congratulatory press releases/stories:

| Media, Montreal

NADbank numbers: Newspaper crisis? What newspaper crisis?

The latest batch of numbers on newspaper readership from NADbank have been released, and in general show newspaper readership about the same as last year despite doomsayers who predict the swift decline of the print medium.

You can see some national trends on NADbank’s website in a PDF presentation. In general, it shows that print is still way ahead of online, that most people still get their news from newspapers in print form, and that rich people are more likely to be print readers. They also show, unsurprisingly, that online readership is continuing to grow, and is more than compensating any losses in print (at least in terms of eyeballs – advertising revenue is an entirely different story).

Unlike services that measure number of subscribers, NADbank gets its data through polling the general population, asking questions like “did you read this newspaper yesterday?” Its polling covers only the market and doesn’t measure out-of-market readership in print or online.

Infopresse crunches the numbers for Quebec newspapers, which for some reason doesn’t include The Gazette. Their chart (PDF) shows little change among La Presse and the Journal de Montréal (which is down slightly from 2010 – is that because the lockout is over?). Le Devoir, meanwhile, has held on to significant gains made between 2009 and 2010, though it is still the last-read paper in Montreal.

Among the free dailies, both have achieved significant gains in readership. 24 Heures is up 12%, profiting mainly from the fact that as of January 2011 it has exclusive rights to distribute in the metro system. But while one would expect competitor Metro to lose a significant amount of readership because of this, it has only continued to grow, up 3% in the last year. It’s undoubtedly more expensive for Métro to hire all those people to hand out papers in the morning, but it is clearly working to stop too many people from switching.

The slower rate of growth for Métro means that 24 Heures is catching up. While in 2009 Métro had 26% more readership on a typical weekday, that’s down to 12%.

The Gazette says its combined readership has hit a five-year high of 554,800 per week. Its print readership is 283,300 on weekdays, 318,900 on Saturdays and 498,000 at least once a week. 24 Heures’s gains have pushed it past The Gazette in terms of average weekday readership.

| Media, Montreal

NADbank numbers: Journal, free dailies gain readers

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.
| Media

Shockingly, people still reading newspapers

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?

| Media

Canadian newspaper readership stable

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.