absolutelyBangkok archive · News & Media
Originally published Oct. 13, 2008
The glossy media kit for one high profile Thai magazine proudly boasts a circulation of more than 50,000 copies per month. To the casual observer that’s nothing out of the ordinary. The worrying truth, however, is that magazine prints just 5,000 copies per month and probably sells little more than 2,000 of those.
That magazine is certainly not alone. All magazines in Thailand exaggerate their sales figures, and because there’s no independent circulation auditing there’s no motivation for publishers to tell the truth.
The magazine publishing industry in Thailand now is the same as Dubai some ten years ago. At that time inflated circulation claims were the industry norm. The change there was driven by the advertising industry. They gave an amnesty to publishers and several years to get audited with the threat of little or no advertising if they didn’t.
By Andrew*, The Bangkok Bugle
The closest thing to auditing right now in Thailand is research from Nielsen Media Research that uses a number of factors to essentially guess the readership of magazines. Using that research in conjunction with rate card prices gives media buyers a fair idea of the value they’re getting. To a lesser extend there’s also a product called Media Atlas from Synovate. This looks at the general reading preferences of society in the form of market research questions.
The only way for buyers to know exactly how many copies a magazine sells is through an independent circulation audit. Globally there are two organizations — ABC and BPA — that are recognized throughout the industry.
The Bangkok Post, which is the only independently audited newspaper in Thailand, has an ABC audit. That reveals an average daily circulation of 63,288 copies for the period from January — June 2008, of which 16,044 copies were sold at cover price through the news trade. It also shows an average of 2,049 copies per day formed part of barter agreements.
That’s the kind of detail that an audit can provide. Currently there are no paid-for magazines in Thailand with an independent circulation audit. Some have an essentially worthless “print run certification” statement. Who cares how many copies are printed? It’s how many that are sold and read that matters.
My feeling is that until the advertising industry insists on circulation auditing there’s no motivating factor for publishers to adopt it. Actually the motivation is not to get audited because it will reveal the true sales figures, and will likely result in the demise of quite a few titles.
And then there’s the inevitable loss of face when the magazine that’s been claiming sales of 50,000 copies per month is discovered to only be achieving less than one tenth of that. And believe me this is not just one magazine; every magazine will be shown to have been exaggerating the true sales figures.
Look at it from the point of view of a buyer. Would you buy advertising from a magazine with an audited circulation of 10,000 copies or from one that claims to have 50,000 sales? What looks better for your client? I do not blame either publishers or media buyers. Publishers want to sell advertising and will massage the figures, and media buyers have no way of knowing whether the publisher’s figures are correct.
It is going to take a massive change in thinking in the minds of both media buyers and publishers for the current situation to change in Thailand. It will also need big changes in the magazine distribution system. There’s little in the way of a paper trail, especially when you get down to the street level sales kiosks. And the speed in which unsold copies are returned to publishers must be increased.
It can sometimes take up to six months for unsold magazines to be returned. Auditing requires a strict cut-off date, and unless a publisher can show the trail from printing all the way through to the money for the sold copy appearing in its bank account within a certain time it cannot be counted as a sale.
Right now there’s no incentive for publishers to get audited, but until that happens there will always be a cloud of confusion surrounding the print media in Thailand. And when the industry is facing competition for advertising from many other sources any confusion can only be damaging.
+++ BangkokDan:
Handling publishing figures the way they handle the truth? I wish there’d be a threat of little or no advertising if publishers don’t adhere to truthful, responsible reporting.
Andrew is the author of The Bangkok Bugle. He has been working in the publishing industry in Thailand since June 2006. He has spent more than 16 years in the media and is originally from the United Kingdom.
ABC statement of the Bangkok Post
The importance of circulation auditing — a campaign from BPA
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