Media Reach is an important metric that helps to measure the size of the potential audience of a piece of content. We call this Potential Media Reach. On Pulsar, this metric applies to media monitoring data sources like Online News, Print and Broadcast content, and is used to provide an estimate of the number of people who have read or viewed a piece of media. In a similar fashion to how Social Impressions on social media help measure the effectiveness of an Ad Campaign, measuring your Media Reach provides great insight into your PR Performance.

On Pulsar, calculating Media Reach for Online News content is based on a combination of the Alexa Rank for the news website where the article has been published, and the number of social shares that article has received. The lower the Alexa Rank, the higher the media reach is for that website. As for the Social Shares, these are based on the number of times an article has been shared on Facebook, which is an indicator of how many people have read it.

For TV and Radio Broadcast, the Media Reach metric is based on the size of the audience of that television or radio show, or the size of the network's audience.

For Print News, the Media Reach is based on the circulation figures for that outlet.

Other tools simply prefer Similar Web's number of website visitors to estimate Online News Media Reach - either way both methods aim to help users get a general understanding of the size of the audience. This in turn helps you assess the success of your PR campaigns as well as determine which story angles work best and which media outlets provide the best coverage.

To see Media Reach in action head to TRAC's new Snapshot Overview page and dive deeper into the Top Content and Top Sites sections, as shown in the gif below.