The circulation of an advertising medium is con stantly changing. Even in the case of direct me diums, which are entirely under the control of the advertiser, there is always the "death" rate to be con sidered. People are constantly' moving from place to place, and the list of names must be kept up to date. It is estimated that in ordinary business lines twenty per cent of any mailing list "dies" every in other words, twenty per cent of the names or ad dresses must be eliminated or changed.
Newspapers are largely sold by newsboys on the street, and much of this circulation may be transient. Ninety-eight per cent of the circulation of some mag azines is news-stand circulation, and a news-stand cir culation may or may not mean either the same readers or the same number of readers from month to month.
Even when magazines go chiefly to subscribers, new subscribers are constantly being added to the lists and old subscribers taken off. It was natural, therefore, for publishers to be slow in approaching such a diffi cult task as the preparation of circulation statements of sufficient accuracy and completeness to make them of any value to the advertiser.
Nevertheless, an advertising rate is necessarily based on the amount of circulation, and advertisers are becoming more and more insistent as to the quan tity and quality of the circulation they buy. Circula tion statements have in the past been indefinite, and often justly open to suspicion.
7. History of circulation statements.—In 1868, Mr. George P. Rowell introduced a plan of insuring reliability of circulation statements. Publishers were asked to furnish to him statements of circulation, de positing a forfeit of $100 each. The amount de posited by each publisher was offered as a prize to any person finding his circulation statement to be false.
Another of the early plans looking toward accurate statements of circulation was conceived by a western advertiser, Colonel Emery Mapes of the Cream of Wheat Company. He asked each publication to Guarantee a certain amount of circulation on which its rate was based, with the understanding that his own auditors should be allowed to audit the circulation, and that, if it was found not equal to the amount guaran teed, he should be rebated pro rata. This plan was so successful that several magazines later guaranteed their circulation to all advertisers offering a pro rata refund in case the circulation of any issue did not equal the guaranteed circulation on which the adver tising rate was based.
Prior to the organization of the Audit Bureau of Circulations there were a number of private auditing associations, many of them performing a useful serv ice. The idea was conceived of bringing all these
associations together in one organization composed of publishers, advertising agents and advertisers, the membership dues to be spent in thoro audits of cir culation for the common benefit of the members. In this way the Audit Bureau of Circulations was born. It has already proved its usefulness, and there is a possibility that at last the difficult problem of obtain ing accurate circulation statements is in a fair way to being solved.
In 1912, the United States government began to require circulation statements from all newspapers that applied for second-class mailing privileges.
8. Duplication of circulation.—Most people read more than one magazine or newspaper. Accord ingly, the advertiser in selecting his mediums some times finds it advisable to determine to what extent the circulation of the periodicals he is considering is "duplicated"—in other words, the number of readers of one medium who are also reached by other medi ums. Some advertisers have contended that dupli cated circulation is largely waste circulation—that if magazine A and magazine B each has a circulation of 10,000, and if fifty per cent of the readers of magazine A are also readers of magazine B, the latter medium is not of so much value to an advertiser as . magazine C would be, also with 10,000 circulation but reaching a group of readers few of whom are subscribers to magazine A. In this case magazines A and B would be said to have a fifty per cent dupli cated circulation.
Duplicated circulation is not necessarily a bad thing; it may be a very good thing, if the advertiser can afford to pay for it. An advertiser conducting an intensive local campaign will use newspapers, street cars, posters and other mediums, with full knowledge that the people who read his advertise ments in the newspapers will also be likely to see the street-car cards and his other sign mediums. He is anxious that they should; he realizes that the average purchaser needs to be influenced many times in many ways before he will buy. In like manner, the inten sive advertiser will use several periodical mediums, many of which are read by the same people, in the well-founded belief that an advertising appeal that comes several times to the attention of a reader will be more effective than if it came before him only once. The intensive advertiser further realizes that an advertisement in a single medium may not even be seen by many readers of that medium, while, if it appears in several mediums, the reader who subscribes for all of them will be likely to see the advertisement at least once.