Sweet Thai Lies: Newspaper & Magazine Sales Figures

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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October 13, 2008 | Filed Under News & Media 

Comments

3 Responses to “Sweet Thai Lies: Newspaper & Magazine Sales Figures”

  1. Klong of Consciousness on October 13th, 2008 11.57 pm

    “Currently there are no paid-for magazines in Thailand with an independent circulation audit.”

    The Thai magazine I used to work for is audited by the BPA, although it may not fall under ‘paid-for’ since it is free for qualifying subscribers.

    Admittedly however, this is the exception and not the norm and most Thai magazines are still a long way from even considering auditing. In fact I now have to deal with many Thai publications who don’t even use email or the internet. The reason they still get advertising is because they use Thai advertisers who don’t have the same expectations that Andrew writes about here.

  2. Andrew on October 14th, 2008 9.06 am

    I am aware that Logistics Manager magazine is audited by BPA, but that magazine is classed as having a controlled free distribution and is not available through the news trade. I stand corrected and should have written “The are no paid-for magazines AVAILABLE THROUGH THE NEWS TRADE in Thailand with an independent circulation audit.” Sorry for any confusion.

    Another side note to this is The Magazine Association of Thailand (TMAT) apparently wants auditing and has suggested it’s the advertising industry that doesn’t want it. That’s contrary to several conversations I’ve had with committee members of TMAT.

  3. Tom Aikins on November 18th, 2008 8.01 am

    If you think that there will ever be any kind of auditing in Thailand you are sadly mistaken. First of all, most of the print advertising that is sold here, and it’s a tiny amount compared to TV, is sold by people to their friends,schoolmates, etc. who buy it mostly as a favor. Also, most of it is bought because of kickbacks. There is no expectation of any kind of gain for the advertiser because that’s not why they are buying it in the first place. It’s an industry that is just as corrupt as any other here. Secondly, the tiny percentage of people who buy the advertising who are actually are buying in a straightforward way have no way of ever measuring the results anyway. Usually the advertising is too vague to do any good or the message is completely wrong for the intended market or one of many other reasons why the ad just won’t work anyway. Almost every Thai marketing person I’ve met over the last 13 years hasn’t a clue about what they’re doing anyway. They basically know almost nothing about advertising at all. Even if they wanted to make an informed decision, which, as I’ve stated above they really don’t, they would be unable to because they are uneducated and basically ignorant of the basic principles involved in either planning an ad campaign or understanding the basic function of advertising in the first place. Selling advertising here is like talking to learning disabled 10-year olds. I’ve seen ads produced by agencies here that are so bad they’re laughable in terms of their message and intent. I write all this after spending most of the last 13 years selling advertising in Bangkok (and 16 years in the U.S.) and talking to hundreds of people in the industry. The level of knowledge here is so low that it’s a wonder that most Thai companies are able to sell anything. Of course, just about every other company is just as incompetent in this area so I guess it all evens out in the end. Put some of these companies into a real marketplace, in a western country for example, and they’d last 10 minutes. And if you look closely at the Bangkok Post’s audit, their first one in 12 years, by the way, you’ll see that they only sell about 35,000 copies, and even that I find to be very dubious. The other 28,000 copies are mostly sold to hotels or airlines for 5 or 6 baht apiece and then given away to people or put in hotel rooms where there is no indication as to whether people even read it. And why they have the BPA do the audit in the first place is suspect. The ABC should have been hired as they typically do consumer publications and the BPA does trade publications which usually are free. The ABC would never have counted any of the copies that go to the hotels and airlines. And, by the way, if you advertise in the classifieds section of the paper forget about that circulation anyway because the hotel and airline copies don’t contain the classified section. As with most things to do with the media here, it’s a sham. Although, it’s not a very important topic in the long run because print is dying here just like everywhere else in the world. Wait five years and see what things are like.

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