Proving your circulation and readership
As you may remember from the section that talked about rate cards, a newspaper's circulation is the total number of people buying the newspaper each day, both through subscriptions and newsstand sales or if it's a free newspaper, how many papers are delivered. A newspaper's readership is the newspaper's total circulation number multiplied by the "pass-along" rate or really the average number of readers in a household, generally thought to be 2 or 2.5.

For example, if your newspaper's circulation is 100,000, then multiplied by 2.5, total readership would be about 250,000. This number also takes into consideration that people might pass the paper along to other readers not necessarily within the household.

Most dailies and weeklies are audited, meaning they bring people from the outside into the newspaper and they check everything out and certify that the circulation the newspaper claims is true. There's really just a couple of major companies that everyone recognizes as newspaper circulation auditors, and the one that's used depends on the type of newspaper. Dailies use a company called the Audit Bureau of Circulation or ABC for short. Weeklies use another company called the Certified Audit of Circulation or CAC. Advertising agencies and many large accounts won't even advertise in a product that hasn't been either ABC or CAC audited.

Another way to prove your circulation is called a publisher's statement. Newspapers that use the US Post Office to deliver its product are required to publish every so often a Publisher's Statement including the total paid and free newspapers that are mailed. Although a Publisher's Statement is also an indicator of circulation, for various reasons some consider its numbers easily manipulated and a bit unreliable.