National Readership Survey

National Readership Survey Research

Fig. 1 The website at first look

Established in 1956 and today provides the most authoritative and valued audience research in use for print and digital advertising trading in Britain. It provides audience research for print advertising trading in the UK. Their surveys don’t only measure how many times a publication is chosen but the amount of times each copy may be read by more than one person.

The survey is done on urban as well as rural, amongst individuals who are 12 years and older. All town classes are covered in the urban area. However, only towns with a population higher than two are reported on an individual basis, smaller towns are reported on the basis of socio-cultural regions defined by language homogeneity, geographic homogeneity, financial and economic administration, regionalisation of culture and lifestyle, caste and class homogeneity (homogeneous composed of parts or elements that are all of the same kind the opposite to heterogeneous).

It also gives information on the duplication between media, and any other forms in between. For publications, one gets the number of readers, type of readers in demographic terms (NRS defines readers by sex, age, income, socio-economic class, occupation, education, geographical location), spread of these readers, and lifestyle parameters such as product ownership and consumption patterns.

Fig. 2 Some of their results 

This data helps them because advertisers who relied on plain circulation (paid sales) data for the allocation of their media budgets did not have access to data on the quality of readership each publication has. They did not know whether money was being used effectively or wasted. They had no broken down demographics but they now do with NRS readership. Studies like the NRS give details not only about the number of readers, But also quality of readers, and the duplication of readers with other competitive publications. NRS 2003 is the first round based on Census 2001, so it is reported by itself. After the next round of fieldwork, the data will be merged, and the moving average figure reported.

For a 100% correct result, one will necessarily have to contact each and every member of the population. However, with limited resources, in the case of NRS, the results are viewed with 95% confidence level with a 25%+/- margin of error. So if one does the survey 100 times, one will get the same results 95 times with a 25% margin of error, which is the outer limit.