It figures

Even at my level of blogging it's hard to get reliable, comparable statistics for take-up. The BBC, I think, is doing its best to come up with sound multi-media consumption figures from around the world - but the details of how it does it are, apparently, six months away.

Catherine Blizzard (Badminton and King's College, London) is Director of Marketing & Audiences at BBC World Service, and, as such, the creator of this year's Global Audience Measure, which puts BBC users worldwide at 308 million. She says Auntie is six months away from being ready to document exactly how that is calculated, but does give some answers to a Freedom of Information Inquiry which asked for the Excel spreadsheet. 

She says the BBC only counts Facebook users if they actively "like" or comment on a BBC page. Which seems reasonable. And explains that, out of the 308m global figure for news and non-news branded services this year, the Facebook & YouTube component is just 5.8m.

There's more on how she "deduplicates" the figures, so that, if you happen to watch, listen and logon to BBC sites, you still should only count once. And there's a little on the Sainsbury formula, which is not a guide on how not to run a supermarket, but a standard media planning tool for broad deduplication (0.95 x random probability). Cool beans, huh ?