BEYOND THE HEADLINE FIGURES

I've written before about audited circulation and the fact The Bangkok Post is the only publication of any kind in Thailand with an independently audited circulation.
Their headline figure for the first six months of this year shows average sales of 62,163 copies per day. When you look deeper you see that figure is made up of 16,404 copies that are purchased for bookshops and newsagents at the cover price (25 baht), 20,830 copies on subscription (of which 1,725 are at the standard annual rate of 4,900 baht and the remaining 19,105 are between 50% and 99% of the standard rate), and 24, 787 that are regular multiple sales, bulk or barter copies sold at less than 50% of the cover price. (12,957 copies of these are sold for between 5% and 20% of the cover price, so essentially less than 5 baht per copy.
As you might expect keeping records to substantiate an audit is hard. As a publisher you need to know exactly where every copy of your publication is at any given time, and more importantly there needs to be a paper trail to substantiate everything.
Within the next few months I'll be starting the process to make our new magazine the first Thai magazine sold through the news trade to undergo an independent circulation audit. It takes a lot of time and will cost a lot of money, but the media buyers that I have spoken to fully understand the standards we are setting and, most importantly, will support us with our trusted circulation figures than another publication that can only claim theirs.
If you want to look at the publicly available data on The Bangkok Post then have a look at http://abcpdfcerts.abc.org.uk/pdf/certificates/14328512.pdf