Half performance

 
René Worni on research results that are too late. 
Colleagues from radio and television and also from the online media have it good. They enjoy a luxury compared to the printed media. This is because they always know how they are received by the public. The famous little box in a few selected households measures the audience ratings for television, the radio clock still listens to DRS even in the shower, and millions of clicks practically collect themselves on the Internet. In the near future, a new Mediawatch will even be able to measure TV, radio and their consumption via the Internet. The newspaper guild can only dream of this intoxicating, rapid interplay between cause and effect. They have to wait a long time for "reader quotas". For a newspaper publisher, it's particularly bad when he wants to quickly throw his opponent out of the market with a free newspaper, for example, or pimp up an old paper and rename it. If he wants to know whether the audience really likes the fact that it now has to read the lifted tabloid straight from the back as well as from the front, then it may already be too late and the audience has fled into new media labyrinths. Even worse: without timely and reliable reach figures, advertisers will chicken out (and they are a reluctant bunch in this country). Without advertisements there is no income, without income there is no newspaper and therefore no readers - the snake bites itself from behind.
What to do? In the worst case scenario, a publisher waits up to a year and a half until it receives the first reliable reach figures for its new title from the Wemf. Until then, they have to resort to expensive and time-consuming special studies to prove their market performance. The free business paper Cash Daily is a good example of this. Wemf's reach figures therefore always come too late. This is not the fault of the research institute, but of the publishers. Their (silent) majority determines the survey rhythm and thus blocks innovations at the same time. As a result, the mere dream of the "total performance" of a publishing house, i.e. the sum of all reach from print, radio, mobile, TV and online, will probably remain for a long time to come.
René Worni, Editor