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.
The ABC is also introducing voluntary reporting for special issues, such as coverage of the floods or the Royal wedding.
A key area of contention – educational sales – will see the the category broken into sub-categories: school sales and tertiary education subscription sales.
“It’s been difficult to deliver subscriptions to students on campus,” said Paul Dovas, ABC’s CEO. “Each institution has its own system.”
Accommodation and airline sales have been separated into two categories – accommodation and hotels, and airline sales.
““There has been a lot of confusion in the market, and although most people were abiding by the rules, it was evident that we needed to bring greater clarity to this area of the rules and our reporting. This included toughening up the audit process,” said Dovas.
Other changes are that the multiple publication sales category has been incorporated into bundled sales, a category introduced in 2009. The sub-committee considered that multiple publication sales were simply another form of bundled sale.
Finally, the event sales category has been increased from a maximum of 1% of average net paid sales to 2%.
Further “structural changes” to the rule book will be introduced over the next 6 months, including new rules for digital, Dovas added.
“Our publisher members have always shown their belief in accountability and these rule changes represent a commitment to increasing the transparency and granularity of their reporting,” Hollings said in a statement.
The review was overseen by the Media Federation of Australia and the Australian Association of National Advertisers, along with magazine and newspaper publishers.
The ABC’s rules were last reviewed in 2006.
So will we now know how many copIes are being sold at vast discounts? Or have they fudged that?
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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.
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