Audit Bureau of Circulations
From Magweasel
The Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) is an organization that gauges and measures circulation, readership, and audience information for magazines, newspapers, and other publications. There are multiple ABCs covering all of the regions of the world; the American ABC was founded in 1914 and is based in Schaumberg, IL, with offices in New York and Toronto.
The ABC is funded with fees from its members, mainly comprised of media companies, advertisers, and some universities.
How the ABC works
Generally speaking, the ABC audits a magazine by first receiving a stated circulation number from the magazine's publisher, then comparing that number with records from retailers, wholesalers, and other links in the magazine distribution chain. ABC publishes its results every six months to members.
A full auditing process can take up to nine months for each six-month period, by which time the situation of the magazine being audited may have changed greatly. In order to provide timelier numbers, the ABC takes the figures submitted by magazines at the end of each six-month period and publishes them as "pink sheets" without any extra auditing. These pink sheets are available two to three months after the reporting period. (If a pink-sheet figure turns out to be too much higher than what the ABC finds with its audit, the publisher may be warned and eventually have its membership revoked for repeat offenses.)
It is far from a perfect system, and magazines have tried to use it in the past to inflate their circulation numbers. Gruner + Jahr USA, the publisher of Rosie magazine (the women's title led by Rosie O'Donnell), admitted in a lawsuit that it had deliberately overstated its newsstand circulation to ABC for the first half of 2001. It was later revealed this practice was frequent among not just Gruner + Jahr but several newspapers across America, setting off an industry-wide controversy that shook many advertisers' trust in the ABC system. The ABC responded by conducting a full investigation and concluding that circulation inflation was not an epidemic problem; most of the offending publishers later reimbursed advertisers.
Game magazines and circulation
Game publishers are not required to report ABC-audited circulation figures to the general public. Instead they report their own figures -- usually in the form of "rate base," or the average sell-through figure they guarantee to their advertisers.
Due to the expense involved, most general-interest magazines in America do not apply for an ABC audit unless their circulation is around 125,000 copies or greater. Once a magazine reaches its point, it usually raises its ad rates to the point where outside confirmation of their sales figures becomes vital. As a result of this, most of the "second tier" of game magazines (such as Play or Computer Games) do not have ABC-audited figures, offering their own figures to advertisers instead.
