NEW YORK: US magazine giant Conde Nast - whose stable includes The New Yorker, Vogue, and Wired - has finally bitten the bullet and signed up to the Audit Bureau of Circulations' Rapid Report Program.
This enhances the longstanding system which reported magazine circulations on a biannual basis.
The replacement, eschewed by Conde Nast since its launch in the summer of 2006, updates media buyers every month with the latest circulation data.
The company's decision to go monthly was likely influenced by that of the nation's largest magazine publisher, Time Inc, which joined the new ABC program in September
The minds of these reluctant giants were almost certainly focused by the threat made by media-buying network MediaVest in May: that it would withdraw its clients' ads from any magazine that failed to switch to monthly reporting by 2008.
Among the titles still resisting the change are Us Weekly, Star, In Touch Weekly, Life & Style Weekly, Rolling Stone, Forbes, New York, Motor Trend, Playboy and The Economist.
But as the 2008 deadline approaches, observers recall Doctor Johnson's famous aphorism and predict a last minute rush: "Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."
Data sourced from AdAge.com; additional content by WARC staff
