By A Correspondent

The claims and counter-claims have begun. In Mumbai, Mumbai Mirror said it’s No 2 again. So did Hindustan Times. Both weren’t incorrect: Mirror may have the second-largest readership, next only to The Times of India, but Hindustan Times is the second-most read broadsheet English daily. DNA’s report too says it’s the second-largest broadsheet daily.

Sadly, the conferences which the Market Research Users Council and Hansa Research Group would conduct to release every round of the Indian Readership Survey have been done away with. The detailed dump is curiously no longer handed out to the trade media.

Consequently, what the MRUC and Hansa expect the trade media to do is to either carry unverified claims of various media entities. Or depend on friendly publications and agencies to give out data.

MxMIndia.com requested veteran media consultant Sundeep Nagpal and his firm Stratagem Media to dig a little deeper and help us come up with a variety of insights given IRS 2011 Q2 data.

For instance: the DNA report quotes a total readership (TR) figure for itself which most media agencies do not recognise. Media agencies and MxMIndia recognise Average Issue Readers (AIR) as currency. Interestingly,  when you look at the numbers for Greater Mumbai, while DNA is a distant third amongst English language broadsheets vis-a-vis The Times of India, it’s difference with #2 English broadsheet Hindustan Times is just 63,000. For HT of course the growth story in Greater Mumbai is tremendous: 27.2% year-on-year and 4.1% in the second quarter.

We asked Strategem for the following:

1. Given the toplines mailed to us by IRS, could we analyse it vis-a-vis the Q1 data for 2011 as well as the Q2 data for 2010 so that we can do a year-on-year analyses?

2. Can we also similary analyse the data region-wise – Hindi belt and North, West, South and East and North East?

3. Can we look at the numbers for the 8 metros combined and separately?

Stratagem has provided us this data, and we present these to you as follows:

First, take a look at the table withe the Top 10 publications across the country – urban and rural India.

Let’s also look at the combined numbers for the eight metros of Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune and Ahmedabad.

The growth story is undoubtedly that of Hindustan which has grown 18.2 percent over the second quarter of 2010, though the growth in the second quarter of this year has now steadied at 1.5 percent. But the winner of the quarter from the toplines of 2011Q2 for across the country is undoubtedly Dainik Jagran with a 3% growth. On a base of 1.59 crore this is big.  The other stories of the big players is also noteworthy. Bhaskar 6.5% y-o-y, Amar Ujala 5.6% y-o-y and The Times of India too at 5.4% y-o-y. Jagran’s y-o-y is 2.9% and Lokmat has grown 2.6 percent over 2010 Q2.
We urge you to click on the links below (these will come up later in the day) for detailed numbers.It is important to note that the numbers thrown up in the above table are not truly indicative of the power of the various publications. Remember, these ratings are only for metros, and the picture is dramatically different for an ABP in West Bengal, and Gujarat Samachar in Gujarat or Thanthi in TN and Sakal and Lokmat in Maharashtra. Ditto with Hindustan and Bhaskar.

Links:

IRS Q2 2011 Hindi Belt & North

IRS Q2 2011 – South

IRS Q2 2011 – East

IRS Q2 2011 Maharashtra & Gujarat

Information courtesy: