Friday, November 14, 2008

Grazia's "incredible" figures while other weeklies slide


ninesmn

Frockwriter hinted that Grazia might have a good Friday. Well congratulations are due to Alison Veness-McGourty and her Grazia team, who have apparently dumbfounded the critics – including frockwriter – by achieving the magazine’s target circulation of 70,000+ copies for its preliminary Audit Bureau of Circulations audit. That’s obviously an average of the first 10 weeks of sales, including what one assumes would have been blockbuster early issues. It's about the only good news for ACP on the weekly front, with the circulations of all other Australian weeklies falling from 0.7 to 18.4percent in the July-September period. Pacific’s Famous fell by 18.4percent.

In a press release Pat Ingram, Publishing Director, Women’s Lifestyle, ACP Magazines, noted:
“We are delighted to confirm that Grazia has hit our launch expectations. Readers and advertisers have embraced Grazia’s unique mix of fashion, entertainment, news, trends and beauty and these figures underscore how in just three months Grazia has already made its mark.”

There remains some confusion as to the exact nature of this first audit.

Media analyst Steve Allen told frockwriter on Tuesday that it was a “publisher’s statement” - and indicated that Grazia’s figures had been flagged with the letters “PR” on the Audit Bureau of Circulations November 30 audit report.

B&T also refers to it today as a “publisher’s statement”.

Crikey today refers to it as a “publisher’s estimate”.

Yesterday, the Audit Bureau of Circulations told this blog that it most definitely is not a publisher’s statement, but a "preliminary" independent audit, based on 10 weeks of sales, because the magazine had not been publishing for the complete 13 week cycle.

Pat Ingram also referred to the success of grazia.com.au which has generated, she noted, “an incredible 9,830,512 million page impressions in just three months”, citing Nielsen Online data for the July 21-October 31 period.

Anyone who punches in the grazia.com.au URL to web intel site alexa.com might be nonplussed to find that grazia.com.au does not even register on alexa.com’s Top 100,000 list.

Punch in grazia.ninemsn.com.au however and it certainly does register in the Top 100,000 – not as grazia.ninemsn.com.au, but as ninemsn.com.au. This is for the simple reason that alexa.com makes no differentiation between the two.

A Nielsen Online spokeswoman told frockwriter that Nielsen has definitely been tracking the right site. Well, that's good to know.

Citing Nielsen data once again, ninemsn.com.au calls itself:

“Australia's leading online media company”, which is visited by "over 8.2 million people each month, representing 75 per cent of Australian Internet users".

Frockwriter understands the ninemsn.com.au site would have generated “hundreds of millions” of page impressions over the July 21-October 31 period.

With link love from ninemsn.com.au, and a A$7million marketing campaign, by all accounts it is not so incredible that grazia.com.au could achieve those results.

2 comments:

Paul said...

I think the claim is 70,000+ a week, not a month.

Patty Huntington said...

thanks for spotting that PH. it should of course have been weekly - but it totally escaped my attention.

things would have been dire if it had been 70,000/month...

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