"Most authoritative and valued audience research in use for print and digital advertising trading in Britain"

What is it and how does it help?

The NRS is a tool which allows stakeholders of magazines and various other publishing to view the demographics and facts about their readers. This can be invaluable, as through learning about the average reader of their magazine, publishers can tailor many things to appeal to them. For example, a certain demographic may favour a certain writing type, or news feature theme. On a more financial side, advertisers may be reluctant to continue advertising to an audience that is not likely to purchase their project due to incompatible interests and products. This could make way for a more conducive advertiser to be chosen, which would benefit not only the advertiser through increasing sales, but the advertorial company, magazine, and reader.

Readership and circulation

Circulation exposes how many copies of a certain publication have been distributed per month through newsstand sales and subscriptions, in order to make progression and observations on sales, perhaps looking at them over time so that correlations can be made between different covers or article styles used in certain issues and the sales of said issue. This is very useful as it asses the visual appeal the magazine has on the newsstand, and whether the overall visuals of the magazine are appealing to the target audience correctly, an issue which can be raised with the art director of the magazine. Readership, however, focuses on how many people read the magazine, and how this allows them to see the demographic of them, and what other magazines they read. All of this enables publishers to learn more about their audience, and the more they know about their audience, the more they can tailor the magazine to their preferences. Readers will view this as a better magazine, therefore sparking recommendations to other people and continual sales.

Negatives

The NRS is not all good however. The point of the survey is to identify categories in which magazines have more readers. However some categories can be so broad they’re almost pointless. For example, when studying what ages read a certain magazine, one of the categories set is 15 – 34. This is a 19 year age gap, and clearly far too wide. A 15 year old will have very different interests and priorities compared to a 34 year old. Therefore, some categories may be seen as inaccurate, and not pose much help or advantage to people who work for magazine publishers.