Media companies and audience size

What is actually going wrong

Media companies complicate audience size, for a reason specific to them. Media companies are measured by audience and paid by advertisers, so their customer is not their reader, and audience size inherits that. One thing audience size on media companies rarely accounts for: traffic estimates are the qualifier and they are the least reliable number available. If you would rather try it than read about it, Company Social Presence Mapper does audience size for media companies today.

Traditional Search Tools

• Their own media kit, for media companies. Free, self reported, and more specific than any third party estimate.
• The platform APIs. Official, accurate and gated. Most now require an app review to read a public follower count, which is weeks of work for one number.
• Social listening suites. Brandwatch, Sprout and the rest do this among many other things. Priced for a brand team, not for a qualification step in a sales list.
• SimilarWeb or a traffic estimator. A different proxy for the same question. Better for whether anyone visits, worse for whether anyone follows.
• Open the profiles. Find the accounts, read the numbers, write them down. Two minutes per brand per network, and completely accurate on the day you do it.

The method

1. Start with one of media companies you already know, so a wrong audience size answer is obvious rather than plausible.
2. Run Company Social Presence Mapper across your list of media companies, which carries 1 ready made setup for audience size.
3. Read ten rows of audience size on media companies by hand before you trust the rest of the list.

Mamba Labs Apify Actors

These are the actors we built for this job. If yours is not covered here, search from the bar at the top of the page or contact us here and tell us what you need.

• Company Social Presence Mapper1 preconfigured task on this page's job.