• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, September 16, 2013

Consumer and advertiser interest in digital publications is growing fast, but audience metrics for digital magazine audiences have remained scattered and inconsistent. Adobe and the MPA, The Association of Magazine Media, hope to change all that with new, standard metrics for digital publications, unveiled over the weekend as part of Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite.

The new metrics, formulated by magazine publishers in consultation with Adobe, establish a baseline for comparison by focusing on four key measures: accumulated readership over a given time period, accumulated sessions over that period, accumulated time spent per reader, and accumulated sessions per reader.

Nick Bogaty, Adobe’s senior director of business development and marketing, noted that Adobe’s implementation of the metrics will be audited by the Alliance for Audited Media, formerly the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

To make the metrics as accessible as possible, Adobe integrated them directly into the DPS software update distributed to its publisher clients over the weekend, including Time Inc., Meredith, Hearst, Condé Nast, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, National Geographic and Rodale.
 
Not all publishers use Adobe’s platform, so the company is also publishing the methodology behind the metrics, detailing how the standard audience metrics are calculated and presented, according to Bogaty. He said the company hopes other vendors and analytics providers will begin offering the same metrics as part of their services.

While adoption of these metrics is strictly voluntary for publishers, the MPA is clearly throwing its institutional weight behind them as part of a larger push to make the digital magazine marketplace more orderly and inviting for advertisers. These efforts appear to be paying off.

According to figures cited by MPA President Mary Berner in August, sales of iPad ad units at some magazines increased 25% in the first half of 2013 compared to the same period in 2012; meanwhile some titles, including Forbes and Wired, claim that more than half their ad revenues now come from digital. But growth remains uneven and digital ad revenues are still a fairly small part of the overall business -- a situation that will have to change if publishers are going to offset continuing declines on the print side.

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