Newspapers to finally reveal average daily sales
The Australian newspaper industry has finally acceded to long running advertiser and agency demands to provide transparency over daily newspaper sales.
An announcement from marketing body The Newspaper Works this morning said: “The members of The Newspaper Works, News Limited, Fairfax Media, APN News & Media and West Australian Newspapers, have advised the Audit Bureau of Circulations Rule Review Sub-Committee that they plan to significantly increase reporting of circulation data, including their daily sales figures.”
At present, advertisers have little idea how sales of a newspaper fare on, for instance, a Monday compared to a Friday. All that is available is an averaged Monday to Friday figures, along with numbers for Saturday and Sunday editions.
Greater transparency has been a major demand from advertisers.
Tony Hale, CEO of The Newspaper Works, said: “We understand and support the request of advertisers and advertising agencies to increase the availability of sales data for national, metropolitan and regional publications. Responding to advertisers and agencies, we propose bringing average daily sales reporting for Monday to Friday editions in line with reporting for weekends.”
According to the announcement: “Going forward, average sales will be available for each day of the week on a quarterly basis.” The new regime should kick in from July, the announcement said with the first information available in November.
It added: “Discussions will take place to determine whether reporting will be provided through a combination of Audit Bureau audits and publisher statements.”
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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What about all the free copies they give away, how are they included?
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Agree. I was at a concert at Taronga Zoo on a recent Saturday evening and was greeted with free copies of that morning’s Herald and when leaving 3 hours later was offered a copy of the next morning’s Sun Herald. No doubt all included in current circulation figures and no doubt repeated across the state/country with all or most publishers. Lets achieve some transparency out of this.
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They are not providing information on daily newspaper sales (issue specific). They are saying they will provide average daily sales over a 13 week period. These are not the same thing.
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A move in the right direction for the dinosaurs at least
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Taronga Zoo paid the publisher for those copies (obviously at a discount) and they were then given free to you the consumer for attending the zoo. That is, they are a cirulated copy and technically they are paid for just not by you directly. And no I do not work for a publisher.
Do you think it would be more transparent to break them out from paid copies at the newsagency?
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I think you’ll find the Taronga Zoo copies are broken out in the event sales category. In other words advertisers can see how many of these types of sales are in the total circulation number and can make their own judgement as to whether they are of any value.
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Yes they are Ted. What I was getting at was what it make sense to have one total for all the paid copies through newsagents etc, and then another total for all the copies like events, travel, students etc where someone else is picking up the bill. Just asking …
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