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ABC to review how newspaper bulk-sales are counted
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 6 March 2009
The Audit Bureau Of Circulations, the independent agency which monitors the circulation of newspapers and magazines, providing crucial statistics for advertisers, has said it will hold a “forensic review” of so called ‘bulk sales’, the process whereby publishers give away their news-stand titles at airports, stations, hotels and restaurants in a bid to boost their overall circulation figures (and therefore the prices they charge for advertising).
According to the Guardian, the review follows the discovery that figures provided by one supplier in the bulk sales market, Dawson Media Direct, were somewhat inflated compared to the number of newspapers ABC themselves could find being distributed. It’s not thought Dawson were deliberately misrepresenting the number of papers they distributed, but that administration systems were such that sizable errors could be made.
There’s also concerns that bulk-sales distributors are not properly reporting how many issues are left at the end of each day, issues that should be deducted from the paper’s circulation figures. Whereas newsagents have a vested interest in accounting for unsold copies (otherwise they’ll be charged for them), it’s thought distributors of free-to-the-public copies are sometimes less accurate. The Guardian quote one newspaper insider as saying: “You can see the bundles of unread copies stacked up every night. There is no proper accounting”.
There seems to be a difference of an opinion as to what effect the apparent inconsistencies in bulk-sales reporting could have on overall circulation figures. Some say very little, others reckon it could have a big impact. The Mail and Telegraph have the highest figure of bulk sales – over 100,000 each – though the Independent relies on bulk sales the most in terms of what percentage of their overall circulation is made up of freebies – currently about 18.5%.
