Newspaper readership in India has not been measured since 2019. The 2020 edition of the Indian Readership Survey, an annual nationwide survey to estimate the number of newspaper readers, was abruptly suspended due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Now that door-to-door surveys are feasible once again, the IRS which provided readership data four times a year, is yet to resume.
For the print media industry in India and their advertisers, this survey provides crucial insights into readership patterns. Newspapers need advertisers to stay afloat, and advertisers need readership numbers to justify their spending. Readership surveys make that possible.
Of course, many newspaper readers have migrated online, a trend that accelerated in India in the last 10 years. But newspapers are still being read. Based on the 2019 (Q4) edition of the IRS, 36% (or 400 million) of Indians ages 12 and older had read a daily newspaper at least once a month. Since then newspaper readership hasn’t been publicly assessed.
Newspapers play an integral role in civic culture. Being informed empowers people to make more responsible individual and collective decisions. At a time when social media is rife with misinformation, and almost half of India’s internet users use WhatsApp for news, credible sources of information such as newspapers are more important than ever.
Reviving the Indian Readership Survey is crucial for the present – and future – of the Indian news media.
Why readership surveys matter
For most people, telling the surveyor whether they read a newspaper each day may seem inconsequential. But for the print media industry, readership surveys are the lifeblood. The “average issue readership” of a paper determines its advertising prices, much like the often controversial television ratings do for TV channels.
In India, about 70% of newspaper revenue comes from advertising, with most of the rest from subscriptions. Without accurate readership data, newspapers would struggle to attract advertisers and negotiate rates. These numbers are the currency on which the newspaper advertising market functions.
Readership surveys provide detailed profiles of a publication’s audience, helping advertisers target their campaigns more effectively. This is especially important in India, where newspapers are rarely mail-in subscriptions and are instead hand-delivered or bought at newsstands. Circulation and subscription figures are, thus, poor substitutes for real readership data.
Typically, readership studies are not restricted to print. Some questions ask respondents about their usage across media and content genres. Therefore, “recall surveys” such as the Indian Readership Survey allow analysts to at least derive somewhat blunt estimates of online news consumption as well.
Readership surveys are not just about measuring media habits. They capture data on broader socio-economic indicators and are a reliable source of trends for data on, for instance, home electrification, the absence of toilets and ownership of a variety of assets.
Overall, with sample sizes upward of 300,000 (one-third of which is rural), they help assess economic and social mobility at scale. Surveys like the annual Indian Readership Survey provide these data far more frequently than India’s decennial census.
Despite the absence of the Indian Readership Survey, advertisers have not stopped buying newspaper ads. Instead of readership, the industry relies on data from the Audit Bureau of Circulation. But circulation – the number of copies printed, sold, or delivered – is not the same as readership. Some copies are never read, while others are shared among several readers. Circulation figures also reveal nothing about who the readers are.
Covid-19 slump, subsequent revival
The pandemic severely disrupted the newspaper industry. Print circulation plummeted as lockdowns and fear of infection pushed readers online. Newspapers bled revenue and struggled to survive. This cast doubts on the viability of an expensive study like the Indian Readership Survey, which is entirely funded by advertisers and publishers.
But the industry has since rebounded with continued advertiser interest and lower newsprint costs. India’s newspaper publishing remains robust, with over 146,000 registered newspapers and periodicals as of 2023. In years leading to the pandemic regional papers, especially in non-English languages and in smaller towns, have driven the industry’s growth.
At the same time, about 450 million Indians on average consume news online at least once a month, with a significant proportion doing so on newspaper websites. Newspaper websites can in theory make money through advertisements. However, online ad revenues tend to be a lot lower than print.
In digital advertising, advertisers specify their target audiences and ad networks can place ads anywhere. Typically advertisers do not specify which publishers to run their ads on. Newspapers on the internet, thus, compete with all websites and apps – not just other news outlets.
Further, advertisers only pay for the number of times their ad is actually seen by their intended target audiences. This mechanism hurts news publishers’ revenue.
As an example, the Delhi-National Capital Region edition of a major national newspaper could charge between Rs 5 lakh and Rs 10 lakh for a front page ad of 200 sq cm, to reach about 5 lakh - Rs 7 lakh readers. The effective price works out to Rs 1,000-Rs 2,000 per thousand readers.
By contrast, the online edition of such a publication earns about Rs 100 per 1,000 “impressions” – the number of times an ad is seen. For a similar audience reached, publishers earn almost ten times more from print papers than from online ads.
Readers rarely pay for news online. India has just 3.1 million news subscriptions, according to the latest Indian Media & Entertainment Industry report from the consulting firm Ernst and Young.
These figures should in theory spur the publishing industry to start measuring its print readers once again. Without readership data, as analyst Vanita Kohli-Khandekar noted, the media industry is running blind.
It cannot simply be assumed that all news consumption has shifted online just because print readership is not being measured.
News is vital to an informed democracy and newspapers in India remain the most credible news providers. Reinstating a national readership survey is essential – not just for the publishing industry but for the health of India’s public discourse.
Harsh Taneja is an Associate Professor of New and Emerging Media at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on media industries and audience behavior.
