Audit Bureau of Circulations

An organization known as the Audit Bureau of Circulations (called the "ABC") makes sure that no publication claims a higher circulation than it actu­ally has. Many of the publications them­selves make surveys to find out how much money their readers have, and how they spend it. There are independent organizations that make surveys of the same kind. Every magazine and news­paper guarantees that each issue will sell a certain number of copies, or more, and if fewer copies are sold, it has to give some of the advertiser's money back.

The cost of advertising in a newspaper or magazine depends on how much space the ad occupies. The page is always con­sidered to be divided into columns, and each column is measured by the "agate line" or "line." There are fourteen lines to the inch. Each line costs so much, de­pending on the circulation. If an ad­vertiser takes "a fourteen-line ad," it means his ad is one inch deep and one column wide, and if the price is one dollar per line, he pays fourteen dollars for it. Advertising in big magazines and newspapers is expensive. A full page in a Sunday comic section in big newspa­pers throughout the country will cost an advertiser about $30,000, in addition to the thousands of dollars he spends pre­paring the advertisement itself. Adver­tising in big magazines, such as Life, costs almost as much.

A monthly maga­zine charges more than a weekly maga­zine or a daily paper with the same circulation, because the monthly maga­zine stays around the house longer before the next issue comes, and there is more chance that someone will see the ad. Most magazines are read by the whole family, so when a publication has a cir­culation of, for example, 3,000,000 copies, they actually have as many as 12,000,000 or 15,000,000 readers. These figures help them to persuade