The new Indian Readership Survey (IRS), which tracks readership of newspapers and magazines, among other things, and has been in the works since October 2011, is ready to go commercial starting April 2013.
Revealing glimpses of the new platform in Mumbai on Wednesday, Media
Research Users Council (MRUC), an industry body comprising major advertisers, agencies, publishers, and broadcasters, said the IRS2013 will be much better, more user-friendly and technologically advanced.
"The industry needed a more secure, robust and adaptable system," said Paritosh Joshi, chairman of the IRS technical committee at MRUC. "The earlier IRS was designed for a relatively simpler media environment than what we have today."
"Security concerns about the earlier IRS stemmed from the fact that it could be compromised but the same cannot be done here," he added.
"The new system will be 100% accurate as it will remove all the possibilities of sampling errors that were there in the earlier version," said Lynn De Souza, chairman, Readership Studies Council of India, a joint venture between MRUC and the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC), which audits the circulation of newspapers and magazines in India, and vice-chairman of MRUC.
Despite the new system being completely different from the previous one, the new IRS, which is the largest continuous survey in the world, will continue to have the same sample size of 255,000, but it will provide better results because of better monitoring of the interviewee.