ABC announces ‘milestone’ changes to auditing rules for newspaper sales
Australia’s Audit Bureau of Circulations has announced changes to the rules for auditing newspaper sales, after months of uncertainty and conflict over what can be counted as a paid sale. Chairman Dr Stephen Hollings called the changes a “milestone” in the ABC’s history.
A key change in the new rule book, the ABC says, is that metropolitan and regional dailies can now report their sales more frequently.
Day-of-week sales data for Monday through to Friday will be standard. Previously, the ABC reported only three figures in a week of sales: Monday to Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
The new rule will be apply from December 30.
So will we now know how many copIes are being sold at vast discounts? Or have they fudged that?
Hello Anonymous (and thanks for being brave enough to use your real name).
The principle goal of circulation audits worldwide is to establish the number of ‘paid copies’. The audit’s job is NOT to determine the price at which those copies are sold. There are various models aroud the world that attempt to do this (e.g. sales at at least 50% of the cover price) and with varying degrees of success.
It was quickly established that ANY rule we could devise that used price paid as a threshold was virtually IMPOSSIBLE to enforce or audit – for example, we have no idea whether every newsagency sells every copy at full cover price (though we’re pretty confident that they do). For example a newsagent could sell the paper at 50c off if you bought a 2-litre milk with it, or offer pensioners a discount and we’d have no idea of these private arrangements apart from that the newspaper was sold. It was also quickly established that any rule that put copies into price ‘buckets’ (say, over and under 50%) was so simple to ‘game’ that it was added little if any value (e.g. discount by 49% and it still counts as a ‘full price sale’).
What has been strengthened is the reporting where a publisher does some form of ‘subscription deal’ with a third-party (school, university, airline, hotel chain etc.), as this is the distribution method that is open to the heaviest discounting. All of these copies will be reported separately from newstand/consumer subscription sales but will still count towards the total sales figures. As long as the copy is ‘sold at a price’ and there is a clear process of counting the returned copies then they qualify. For example, in Tim’s video those returned copies that he filmed before they went back on the truck, are deducted from the amount of delivered copies, (and the student has to produce their subscription card so they qualify). So what if the uni student gets all papers for a dollar a week as long as we know how many copies fell into this category of distribution.
I hope that clears some things up.