The Audit Bureau of Circulations has modified its guidelines for counting sales of bundled and “hybrid” print and digital newspaper sales in the U.S. and Canada. In some ways, the changes reflect the the increasing adoption of e-paper editions on PCs and on mobile phones. But some observers feel that the numbers may skew results to make it look like a publication has multiple readers were it only has a single individual.

The new policies, which go into effect on Oct. 1, (listed here) regard a hybrid subscription in the case of a subscriber who receives at least three days of the newspaper in a print format and four days in a digital format. The newspaper only counts one copy per day.

A bundled subscription is defined as “access to the newspaper’s digital edition, access to the newspaper’s mobile app or access to the newspaper’s e-reader edition. The newspaper may want to count multiple copies per day.”

In a post on his Newsonomics blog, Outsell’s Ken Doctor wonders whether the new circ regime will work well for advertisers.

For one thing, marketers are increasingly focused on buying online audiences, not publications, specifically. “[Advertisers] want to know who (gender, age, household status, region, clickstream behavior, recent buying behavior and more) and they want to target on the fly, as the world turns, spinning ever more quickly. So audience targeting is getting to be instantaneous; a 20th of a second is what we hear it takes,” Doctor says.

With that mindset in place, does it matter to an advertiser if someone bought a newspaper across its range of print and digital versions? Not as much as it used to. Doctor adds, “My feeling, and it may not be a fair one, is this is like recasting the steamship data, as trains and cars roll into the world.”

But that’s a larger issue for advertisers and publications to manage. Ad relevance aside, in response to questions about whether the new policies will make circ look inflated, an ABC rep said it’s simply being transparent.

The rep described two scenarios. In the first one, a subscriber pays an additional amount to receive additional copies in print or online and the numbers should reflect that. A newspaper could offer subscribers a seven-day print subscription for $100 per year and then offer access to the newspaper’s digital edition, access to the newspaper’s mobile app and access to the newspaper’s e-reader edition, each for an extra $5. If the subscriber wanted access to all formats of the newspaper, he would pay a total of $115 for the year.

In this example, those copies would all count as paid because the subscriber had the option to not purchase the additional copies, but chose to purchase them and paid an incremental amount above the print subscription price, the ABC (NYSE: DIS) rep said.

In the second example, let’s say a subscriber does not pay an incremental amount for additional access. In this case, the newspaper then has to demonstrate that the subscriber accessed the additional digital copies. In a bundled promotion, the first or base subscription counts as paid circulation. For any subsequent digital editions, the newspaper must demonstrate that the subscriber accessed the digital edition at least once per week to qualify the circulation as paid.

In scenario two, the circulation could also be counted as “verified circulation.” To qualify as such, subscribers have to register and activate the digital edition components of their subscriptions. For example, a subscriber would need to register and create an account on the newspaper’s website to qualify the digital edition as verified circulation. Similar measures would need to be taken for mobile apps and e-reader editions, the ABC rep added. Release

• Audit Bureau Revises Guidelines For Broader Inclusion Of E-Reader Newspaper, Mag Editions