Sales Outlet Subscription Rate Not Aggregated
Sample Ratio Inappropriate Compared to Population
Call to Halt Use of Government Advertising Execution Indicators
[Asia Economy Reporter Sim Nayoung] Four domestic media organizations criticized the government's new media advertising execution standard, the 'newspaper readership rate' data, as unreliable and urged the government to stop using it as an advertising indicator.
The Korea Newspaper Association, Korea Local Newspaper Association, Korea Local Newspaper Council, and Korea Newspaper and Broadcasting Editors Association pointed out in a statement on the 24th that the '2021 Newspaper and Magazine Usage Survey' announced by the government on December 30 last year lacks validity in its selection criteria and weighting.
The four media organizations said, "The recent newspaper and magazine usage survey only included household subscription rates in the survey target, excluding workplaces such as offices, stores, schools, and newsstands," adding, "Although newspapers are read more frequently in workplaces than at home, excluding workplaces from the survey target resulted in a half-baked survey."
They also raised the issue of inappropriate sample ratios relative to the population in each region. The four media organizations explained, "Although Gyeonggi-do has the largest population nationwide, its sample ratio in this survey was the lowest at 0.06% among the 17 cities and provinces," adding, "In contrast, Sejong City had the highest at 0.39%, and Gyeonggi-do showed a large difference compared to Jeju at 0.26%, Ulsan at 0.21%, and Daejeon at 0.18%." The core issue is that the readership rates of local media in regions with low sample ratios inevitably come out lower, which violates fairness.
They also pointed out that the application of opaque weighting causes distortion in readership rates. "In this survey, households were weighted according to residential type, and individuals were weighted by region, gender, and age. As a result, although the number of respondents who said they read Newspaper A and Newspaper B were almost the same, the weighted readership rates of the two newspapers differed beyond the margin of error," they said, adding, "The weighting process and calculation method have not been clearly disclosed."
They mentioned errors such as small local newspapers being excluded from the survey and internet newspapers that do not publish paper editions being counted in the paper newspaper readership rates.
The four media organizations said, "Although the sample size is ten times that of past surveys and the survey cost 740 million won, it has so many defects and errors that it is hard to believe it is a survey funded by a huge amount of public money," adding, "The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism criticized the fairness of the ABC Association's circulation certification method and said it would use readership rates as a government advertising execution standard, but the new execution standard proposed as an alternative has many errors."
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