Market share is another metric like this in my opinion. The local newspaper owns its market completely. I bet advertisers get given all sorts of impressive stats. I bet they count me and both my neighbours as readers, despite all three copies going from the letterbox, up the drive and into the recycling bin (or the fire in winter).
Right. That drives the distribution of "free" newpapers and publications of various stripes.
The real meat is in producing results -- a reason I've found CPM or clickthroughs or readership, or other forms of measurement to be somewhere between irrelevant and misleading. It's why promo codes (including branded URLs such as http://product.example.com/npr , say) are used (they track responses). Similarly coupons or other special deals.
Don Marti's long argued that highly-targeted advertising actually has strongly negative. That it's the very wastefulness of mass advertising that's a powerful part of the signal:
Quoting Evan Davis et al: βIt is not so much the claims made by advertisers that are helpful, but the fact that they are willing to spend extravagant amounts of money on a product that is informative.β
Of course, this can backfire: if I'm aware that a specific advertiser (or industry) has a long history of deceptive advertising or trade practices, I may read their ads as a negative signal (as, in fact, I do for many mass-market consumer goods: if you've got to spend that much money convincing me this is something worth buying, it's quite possibly not).
