Digital Publications

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Reporting Standards for products registered in the Digital Publications sector.

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Reporting Standards

• Overview
• Metrics
• Requirements
• Reporting

Latest updates

Issued December 2021

• From periods ending January 2022 the mandatory metric for products reporting to the Digital Publication Standards is Publication Active View. This follows a change to Business and Consumer Magazine Reporting Standards that allows digital only magazines to report circulation on magazine certificates.

Issued April 2021

• As an alternative to reporting calendar months, you may opt to use the equivalent dates for the relevant months according to the published ABC Accounting Calendar. This would allow, for example, a newspaper to align their Digital Publication's periods with their print publications by using periods that include only whole weeks, starting on a Monday and ending on a Sunday.

Issued June 2019

• Where digital copies are sold bundled with another ABC claimed product, and they are claimed as circulation on an ABC Digital Publication certificate (which is separate to the print certificate), they must be reported in the ‘bundle’ category.

Issued June 2015

• Provisions: You may make provisions when reporting Publication Active Views or Paid Circulation from the June 2015 reporting period.

Issued July 2014

• It is clarified that optional breakouts of metrics can be reported.

• Due to difficulties in reporting breakouts of metrics for editions where advertising has changed this requirement is suspended up until reporting periods ending 30th June 2015.

• A new optional metric has been added, Total Edition Active View, which is the simple sum of the Publication Active View figures of different, applicable editions of an issue/day. (Note: This figure is not be de-duplicated by device).

Issued January 2014

• Treatment of publications that do not have identifiable issues: Publications that are not published on a regular and known frequency (e.g. are updated continuously) can now be reported.

• Definition of a publication: The part of the definition that refers to the publication being presented in a ‘metered (i.e. linear)’ format that allows ‘...the user to progress from beginning to end in a linear progression’ has been removed.

If you require information on any earlier changes please contact us.

Archived standards

If you require past versions of Reporting Standards you can find them here.