The Audit Bureau of Circulations in the United Kingdom has no eminent plans to produce a single combined figure for newspaper and online readership like its American counterpart.

ABC announced last Tuesday it had approved development of the new measurement tool Audience-FAX, which will combine newspaper readership and online audience estimates into ABC circulation reports beginning in November. The figure will appear at the end of audit certificates in addition to print circulation numbers, and the combined readership total will be based on a research panel with data assembled by Scarborough Research.

There are no plans to add such a figure to ABC In Britain audit certificates, Chris Boyd, chief executive of the British ABC, told MediaGuardian.co.uk. For the equivalent to the U.S. version, ABC would need to add an estimate compiled by the National Readership Survey, a panel-based research group currently developing a system for measuring online and print readership, MediaGuardian reports.

“We're still in a guessing period but we'll be looking at this with interest,” Boyd is quoted in the article as saying. “We could move to this if it proves to be a useful model. What advertisers really want are hard stats, and online you can get hard stats but buyers all have their own, different ways of justifying how they spend their clients money.”

ABC in the United Kingdom and the United States are run by a board of publishers and advertisers. Boys said publishers are probably the driving force behind the move, as they are pushing for figures that represent the reach of their brands across multi-platforms.