Newspaper circulation in Australia dropped in the second quarter, according to the latest Audit Bureau of Circulation figures. Monday to Sunday newspaper sales was down 2.5 percent year-over-year, according to the Australian Associated Press article posted on Sydney Morning Herald.

Among all the 25 main capital city and national journals and weekend newspapers, 22 of these reported a sales loss for the month of June quarter.

The Sunday Mail in Queensland dropped the most, down 6.8 percent to 514,405, while The Australian Financial Review was down 5.9 percent to 77,046.

The Age and the Geelong Advertiser plunged 4.5 percent and 4.1 percent, to 197,500 and 180,091, respectively, according to Top News.

The Daily Telegraph's sales decreased 3.8 percent to 374,395, while the Herald Sun fell 2.1 percent to 515,500.

Sydney Morning Herald also slipped 1.4 percent to 207,013.

The West Australia and News Limited's Daily Telegraph were the only two titles with a sales increase, at 3.3 percent and 0.8 percent, respectively.

Brazilian newspapers increased their circulation in the first six months of 2010 to a daily average of 4.3 million copies, which represents a growth of 2 percent when compared with last year, according to the monitory agency IVC, EFE reported yesterday.

These results are good news for an industry that in 2009, after five years of solid growth, saw a circulation decline of 3.46 percent due to the economic crisis, Prnoticias.com noted.

However, IVC President Pedro Martins Silva said the growth could have been steeper if had not been for a decline in June's newspapers sales, the lowest since January 2008.

According to O Globo, Martins Silva attributed the sales decline to the results of the World Cup in South Africa. "A similar behavior was perceived in June 2006 [during Germany's World Coup], which brings up the hypothesis that the World Cup generated this change in the consumers' behavior," he said.

U.S. newspapers will completely change they way they report circulation beginning October 1, following changes to circulation rules made by the Audit Bureau of Circulations' board, Editor & Publisher reported today.

The changes include newspapers now being able to count one subscribers multiple times; for example, a subscriber may be counted once for his print subscription, once for his e-reader subscription, and so on. This also includes online, mobile and other subscriptions. Another major change is that newspapers may include "branded editions" (products published under a different name, such as a commuter daily) in their total average circulation. "The board's aim is to establish a foundation for the future as more newspapers move to bundled print/digital subscription offers and hybrid publishing plans," the ABC board announced in a press release.

Newspaper Web sites are benchmarked on two key metrics: revenue per unit of print circulation, and share of online advertising spent in that newspaper's local market, according to Borrell Associates.

The circulation benchmark is useful only from the perspective that the size of the newspaper might be relevant to the revenue its Web site can generate. However, this metric is becoming less relevant as many newspapers branch out beyond mere "newspaper sites" and use the Web to launch multiple products such as online directories, mobile applications or e-mail newsletters. It is likely that many smaller newspapers could be generating 10 times the online revenue of a newspaper with twice its circulation. In short, print circulation has less and less to do with a company's ability to generate significant Web revenues, SFN's World Digital Media Trends 2009 reported.

One reason for the rebound in online revenue per circulation unit for the largest-circulation newspapers, which saw per-circulation revenues decline in 2007 but then saw a huge jump last year, was the fact that the base of this metric, circulation, declined significantly.