US print circulation certifier the Alliance for Audited Media is updating how it collects publisher digital circulation data to give a more accurate picture of “the health of the industry” to the market.
The auditor’s chief executive, Richard Murphy, told Press Gazette that at present many publishers do not report key figures such as digital subscriptions at all. And while print (AAM’s current main focus) remains in decline, he said, it remains a hugely important source of revenue fore most US publications.
Murphy, who has led the non-profit organisation since it merged with fellow auditor BPA Worldwide in 2023, said the organisation expects to roll out new digital reporting options for its next filing period in September.
Press Gazette recently reported the most recent AAM figures for top US magazine and print newspaper circulations, and Murphy said the articles had prompted some introspection.
“I was surprised to learn how many of our large news media publishers were not reporting their digital circulation with us,” he said.
Press Gazette’s story about the top US newspapers focused on print circulations. If we had reported the digital figures collected by AAM they would have looked strange to anyone who knows the market.
The New York Times, for example, is the most-subscribed news publisher in the English-speaking world, with nearly 11 million digital subscribers. But in the most recent AAM report, for the six months to the end of September, the NYT is recorded as having “total digital replica” circulation (i.e. leaf-through, digital copies of the newspaper) of 660 and “total digital nonreplica” circulation (everything else) of zero.
This, Murphy said, was providing “an inaccurate picture of the health of the industry to the market… The challenge is that many of the largest news media publishers are not placing their digital circulation in the AAM reports.”
AAM was founded in 1914 as the Audit Bureau of Circulation (not to be confused with its British counterpart of the same name and function). When publications first started putting news online, Murphy said, AAM processed the new data through a print lens.
“We had words like ‘replica’ – it looked just like it, it’s just a digital version of a run of press. And then we had another term, called ‘non-replica’, and that was everything else.
“We struggled with how to identify it, how to define it, and how to count it and report it. We created all these rules around it and it actually became quite arduous – and so publishers just decided not to do it anymore: ‘I’ll just report my print and my digital replica but we’ll leave the other stuff off – the desktop, the mobile, the apps.’”
But, Murphy says now: “That’s the fastest-growing segment for these publishers, and they’re being left off of our reports.”
The realisation, he said, had “prompted action” at AAM.
“First thing’s first, let’s use the language that the digital economy uses,” Murphy said. “Nobody’s using the words ‘replica’ and ‘non-replica’ in the digital space. They’re using desktop, mobile web, mobile app. They’re using terms like ‘owned and operated’. They’re using terms like ‘third-party platforms’.”
The hope was that by speaking the language of the digital economy, The New York Times will begin putting its 11 million subscribers, or The Wall Street Journal its four million, into their AAM reports.
“This way, when you see our data, you have a very good picture of what’s going on, rather than seeing just declining print numbers and then, at the bottom of the article: ‘Oh, and by the way, they say these are the digital numbers as well’.”
The organisation is a nonprofit, generating revenue from publisher memberships and audit fees, advertiser licensing agreement and an assurances arm. (Murphy said that branch works “very closely with the adtech community to validate digital measurement, anti-fraud, brand safety, malware, privacy and consent”.) Its revenue for the most recent year available, 2023, was $13.8m, down from $14.6m the year before.
The actual process of auditing involves checking payment trails, validating subscribers are real and, in the case of physical newspapers, finding out how and through which carrier networks a given print run was distributed.
Unlike in the UK, where several high-profile newspapers have left ABC auditing in recent years, Murphy said AAM had seen relatively few publishers drop out. Instead it had been ad buyers who have been more likely to “resign” from the system.
“We had a recent membership study and we asked buyers: what more data do you want?”, Murphy said. “And they came back with: we don’t want any more data, we want more product. We want more brands.”
As a result, he said, the organisation had introduced an “enterprise audit” – the option to have a company-wide audit encompassing all a publisher’s brands instead of going title-by-title.
He explained: “Basically it’s our experience that publishers make audit decisions on a brand basis and on an economic basis – it pays to have the AAM on it for this publication, it doesn’t pay for this publication.
“We want to remove that friction. You’re using the same process, the same tech, the same vendors across the whole portfolio. I don’t want price to be the barrier, so we’re going to audit this at the enterprise level and put everything in.”
Print is ‘the engine that could’ amid digital transition
Murphy said that among his publisher member, pretty much all were “seeing good growth in digital, in both numbers and in revenue”.
“It’s not at the moment, for most, offsetting the decline in print, but their expenses are falling down, so their margins are improving as well.”
He cited Dotdash Meredith’s D/Cipher contextual advertising technology as a notable innovation in the area, as well as advances in algorithmically guiding power users at websites into subscribing. (He cited The Washington Post in particular, saying the creation of the equation that powers when its paywall appears “rivalled putting a rocket in space” – see below.)
One trend in magazine circulation over recent years, both in AAM and ABC figures, has been the rise in “all you can read” subscriptions via services like Apple News+. Murphy said some of his publishers had “been very successful with it”, which had led to greater interest among their peers.
But he added: “Conversely, publishers are starting to look at this to see – ‘wait a second, are these services cannibalising my direct business?’ Because the direct business is much more profitable than getting a slice of Apple News+.”
Despite the digital growth, Murphy said it was “the unsexy truth” that for many publishers print remained “a very important revenue driver”.
“It’s generally in the top three revenue buckets for every publisher out there,” he said. “Usually digital is number one, events are number two and then print is number three – and then there’s everything else.”
Print may be getting smaller, he said, but “it’s the engine that could”.
Another challenge to the health of publisher circulations had come to prominence in October, when The Washington Post and LA Times reportedly both shed large numbers of subscribers when their proprietors intervened to prevent the papers from endorsing presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
Murphy said commenting on the trend was “beyond my expertise, but the data suggests that there is a connection between the proprietor and the actions they take [that] can really impact the health of the media”.
Murphy was speaking with Press Gazette amid the US government’s back and forth with Canada over the possible levying of 25% tariffs, which would hit North American newspapers hard. (US newspapers often use Canadian newsprint, although newsprint have been exempted from the tariffs announced this month.)
Murphy said “everyone is very confused here”.
“They get placed, they get pulled back, they’re threatened and then they’re compromised. So everyone’s quite aware, they’re just not really sure quite where they’re going to land yet – they’re not sure how much of this is actually posturing for something else or how much of it is real.”
Last month upstate New York’s Cortland Standard, purportedly one of the oldest family-owned newspapers in the US, shuttered, citing among the causes the expected tariffs.
Murphy said: “It is becoming quite challenging to operate in this environment.”
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