HUBERT LACROIX’S EXCELLENT article on CBC’s web and digital activities has one flaw, it aggrandizes the audience numbers of cbc.ca, which by any measure are small compared to conventional CBC TV and radio.
M. Lacroix would do well to read my CRTC report on measuring audience success, which defines terms like audience reach (Click here for that)
Audience reach is the measure used for the web primarily because it conceals the fact that very few people actually visit most individual web sites with any frequency.
Here is how I defined reach: "Reach is sometimes called cume audience and in Internet audience research is referred to as unique visitors. If reach is calculated over a large number of program episodes or a long enough time period, say, in the case of Internet web sites over the course of a month, it will generate a large number, since more people will have tuned in at least once… over a month."
Barry Kiefl
Canadian Media Research Inc.
Ottawa
