Agility has made the switch from using the term 'Audience Reach' to 'Impressions' in Monitoring. We made this switch to better represent and describe the total views of an article and or group of articles in your monitoring and reporting.

“Audience Reach” implies how many people an article or a clip may have reached. In Targeting, where we deal with audience or circulation, reach is a better overall term to describe how many people might read the content published by the outlet.

On the other hand, in monitoring and reporting, where we are often looking at a group of many articles or clips as a collection, the continued use of the term “Audience Reach” can be misleading.

Let’s understand this with an example.

When we talk about an article in monitoring, what we are trying to understand is how many potential views or ‘opportunities to see’ (i.e. impressions) an article or a clip has had.

So, for example, if an article appeared in The New York Times, and The New York Times has a potential audience reach of, say, 89 million, then at an individual article level we can say that the article reached 89 million people or there were 89 million ‘opportunities to see.’

However, if there were 10 articles published in The New York Times in a month then the total potential views or ‘opportunities to see’ (i.e impressions) will now be 10 x 89 million = 890 million.

However, it is important to note that in terms of reach the 10 articles are still reaching the same 89 million people and not a total of 890 million people. Therefore, it will be misleading to say that the 10 articles in The New York Times had an audience reach of 890 million people.

The correct way to make a statement here will be that there were 890 million impressions i.e. 890 million opportunities to potentially see these 10 articles.

To summarize, in targeting it is accurate to say that an outlet has a audience reach of X million. But in monitoring it is more appropriate to say a collection of articles had Y million impressions (i.e opportunities to potentially view).