Pearson-owned Financial Times is withdrawing itself from the monthly online audit conducted by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, MediaWeek.co.uk reported today.

Amidst skepticism and disagreement over metrics available to advertisers and agencies for print and online advertising, the move the makes the FT the UK's first national daily to drop its ABCe audit, which could lead to a complete review of the current auditing process in the country. "The FT no longer participates in ABCes as volume traffic measures have become less relevant to our advertisers and clients," a spokesperson for FT was quoted by StrategyEye.com as saying. "We do not intend to compete on volume, rather the quality of our registered and subscriber readership."

Following the path set by its rivals - such as News International, which withdrew its web traffic information data from ABCe prior to introducing the Times paywall - the move has already raised concerns about the viability of ABCe. However, the company still "continues to work with ABCe" as members, under the provison that its sites must be publicly certified at least once within the next year, as stipulated by JICWEBS, the UK committee that defines the auditor's standards, MediaWeek reported.

This announcement follows the recent launch of an audience measurement system called "Average Daily Global Audience (ADGA)" by the business daily last week. It uses a combination of sources, including syndicated national and regional readership surveys, unique user and browser data, MediaWeek reported. The research is conducted with independent assurance from PricewaterhouseCoopers, by measuring the number of global audiences on print and online, on an average daily basis.

Calling the introduction of its own audience measurement system for both online and offline as a "ground-breaking move," Ben Hughes, deputy chief executive of the FT, told MediaWeek: "Traditional measurements (ABCs and readership surveys) focus on one or the other and are not consistent across the globe. It's the quality of our registered and subscriber readership that matters to our advertisers, rather than volume."

He added that the newspaper is developing an audited global paid-for circulation number, taking into account the number of subscribers and consumers of FT content.