Misleading advertisements in newspaper!

      Today's TOI has the below advertisement of 'The Economic Times' (ET as short name) and how well the ET is far from the combined other financial papers. They claim that the ET readership is about 77% higher than the combined readership of 'Mint + Business Standards(BS) + Hindu Business Line(HBL)'.

    First let us understand the difference between readership vs circulation in newspaper. A newspaper's circulation is simply the number of newspapers that are in circulation on an every day basis. While the newspaper readership is the number of people who read it. Readership is typically 2.5 times the circulation as on an average 2.5 people read the same newspaper.  For instance if 1 lakh newspapers are circulated in a day then the readership is typically 2.5 lakhs.

 

Courtesy - TOI

 

     Now coming back to the advertisement above, ET claims that they have 1,109 readers daily while Mint+BS+HBL combined readers are around 626. Ok, thats a difference of 483 readers. But are you fooling people by this ad?

     Let me first clarify that ET ad is smartly marketed as they missed the other two business newspapers - Financial Chronicle and Financial Express.  What about these readers? Are they left off so the ET readership numbers look great? ET is the number 1 business newspaper, no doubt. But manipulating the facts to showcase they are better than the combined readership of other 3 newspaper leaving the other top 2, doesn't give the necessary credit.

       Wikipedia article on 'List of business newspapers' has the circulation numbers as below:

   ET - 405,940

   Mint - 226,000

   Business Standard - 217,000

If mint & BS are combined together in circulation then its roughly 443,000 that is quiet more than ET. Readership being 2.5 times the circulation does not substantiate what ET ad is trying to say. Again the ET ad fails to clarify this.    

        Lastly it does not matter how popular ET is in terms of readers, but the best stock market newspapers in India lists BS, Livemint, HBL as top 3 compared to ET which is placed at 6th as per the article in tradebrains.

      Finally my point is just cooking up the numbers, facts, figures to showcase you are better than the average does not take you far. You can't fool readers for long. It is a short term strategy which will eventually fail. Ethics in advertisements are yet to evolve for the betterment of society.