Audiences v. Circulations

Lusty competitors for the national advertisers' dollars are radio and mass circulation magazines. Oddest aspect of their rivalry is the dissimilarity of their respective yardsticks for sales effectiveness. Radio's known quantity, the number of sets within listening range of transmitting stations, are scaled down in order to ascertain the actual audience at a given moment. But magazines' known quantity, net paid circulation, is rarely scaled upward to ascertain the corresponding potential audience of a given issue.

Last week, one magazine, LIFE, made public not only for itself but for three other big-selling weeklies, the first results of a survey, conducted by independent experts,* showing that if admen preferred to buy audiences, magazines could make an impressive showing under that system of scoring.

Estimating a total potential U. S. reading public of 107,300,000 persons over nine years old, excluding the blind, deaf-mutes and inmates of institutions, LIFE's experts made 8,030 interviews to appraise the number of people who see, open and read some part of an average issue of Collier's, Liberty, LIFE, Satevepost, found that 14.8% were Collier's audience, 13% Liberty's 16.1% LIFE's and 12% Satevepost's. These net percentages were established after 5,700 more interviews eliminated exaggerators and nitwits through "confusion control" tests. When the final percentages were applied to the 107,300,000 total, the magazine audiences appeared as follows:

Net circulation paid Estimated "audience"

Collier's 2,633,878 15,900,000 Liberty 2,485,395 14,000,000 LIFE 2,029,761 17,300,000 Satevepost 3,055,123 12,900,000

These findings, published in eight newspapers, aroused Crowell Publishing Co. (Collier's) to deny publicly any connection with the study, deny its attributed audience of 15,900,000, declare such figures "unsound and confusing." Advertising Age, admen's newspaper, reported a long background of discussions toward a cooperative study by advertising agencies and leading magazine publishers to measure "the limits of magazine audiences, thus giving advertisers a readership potential comparable with the number of radio sets," hazarded a guess that publication of LIFE's first findings might accelerate this cooperative project.

*Paul T. Cherington, independent marketing consultant; Archibald M. Crossley and Samuel Gill, Crossley Inc; Dr. Darrell B. Lucas, N. Y. University.

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