MAGAZINES AND THE CRAZY SALES CLAIMS

With the lack of independent circulation auditing for magazines in Thailand it's a fact that every magazine massages its sales figures. This isn't a problem that's unique to Thailand, but in other parts of the world publishers have been slowly forced into telling the truth about their sales. That's fine for those publishers with strong brands and equally strong sales but it's not good news for those magazines that are struggling.
When discussing this issue I often quote the example of one business magazine here which claims to sell 50,000 copies per month when, in reality, it prints just 5,000 copies and distributes less than 3,000 of those. In all likelihood that same magazine sells barely one thousand.
When you look at some basic industry facts some of the claims just look plain silly.
According to 2008 figures from the Publishers and Booksellers Association of Thailand there were 2,438 bookshops in the Kingdom. Taking the example of one leading Thai language men's magazine which claims to sell 150,000 copies per month in its media kit, that means an average sale in every bookshop in Thailand of slightly more than 60 copies. And when you understand that achieving a sell-through rate of 50 per cent of copies supplied to a single location is pretty hard to achieve, that means they're claiming to be supplying more than 100 copies to each of those stores up and down the country.
How many times have you seen more than a dozen copies of any magazine on sale in Thailand?
Independent circulation auditing will happen in Thailand. I've been saying that for a number of years and I'm even more convinced it must happen, not least to boost the appeal of magazines as a serious and credible advertising medium.