ABC's Rapid Reporting proves a hard sell with U.S. publishers

Rapid reporting? Not so much. Last June we reported that the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) in the U.S. was rolling out something called Rapid Reporting, which would allow consumer magazine members in good standing to voluntarily report their top-line circulation data on an issue-by-issue basis, usually within weeks of circulation to subscribers and on newsstands.

According to a story on the Portfolio magazine website portfolio.com, however, not many publishers are rushing to take up the opportunity.

Jeff Berkovici reports

As of yesterday, the January issues of most monthly magazines had been off newsstands for nearly a full month. Yet only a few major publishers -- including Alpha Media Group (publisher of Maxim and Blender), ESPN (ESPN The Magazine), American Media Inc. (the National Enquirer, Men's Fitness), and Johnson Publishing (Ebony) -- have reported numbers for the month. Time Inc., Hearst, Conde Nast (parent of Portfolio), Hachette Filipacchi, Meredith Corp., Rodale and Wenner Media all have yet to report their numbers -- even for their weekly and biweekly titles.

He suspects that it's because publishers are used to being able to massage numbers to get the best possible six-month average, rather than issue-by-issue figures.

ABC only requires publishers' circulation reports to be accurate on the basis of a six-month average, not on an issue-by-issue basis. Advertisers, however, care about the distribution of the specific issues in which they ran ads. Thus, a publisher who knows how many copies each issue sold in a six-month period can smooth out the spikes, subtracting copies from the high-selling ones and adding them to the low-selling ones to insure that each individual issue meets its rate base, or circulation guarantee.

But require publishers to report their numbers before they know how subsequent issues will sell and the whole scheme falls apart. That may be why at least one executive at an early-reporting company has received calls admonishing the company not to file so promptly.