Readershipresearch

The term “Readership” has been historically applied to readers of newspapers, magazines and trade journals.  However, it can just as easily be applied to a variety of new media channels – many websites, for example, have a “readership” (or perhaps one might even say an “audience” if they have a strong film/video clip content).

Nevertheless, there are a variety of things that those who advertise in such media, not to mention the publishers themselves, would need to know.  At a basic level it’s important to know who would read the content - how many people, who they are and what their profile is.  This is all good stuff but it is nevertheless only part of the story.  There are a lot of other questions you might wish to investigate in order to obtain a more detailed understanding of precisely how these people use a particular media source:

• What do they actually read within a magazine/website?
• Why do they read it – what are they actually looking to get out of it?
• What interests them? 
• What do they ignore?
• What do you need to do to get them to read something rather than ignore it?
• What kind of messages/images are they likely to respond to?