About Subscriber Rating

Subscribers receive rates based on subscription period (for example, 18.00 for 3 months). To do subscriber accounting, however, Circulation must boil down these period rates into a copy rate. This is a simple rate per day for the subscription. For example, with a flat 3-month rate at 18.00, assuming there are 90 days in the period, the copy rate would be 18/90, or 0.20 for each paper. The copy rate is used in calculating Unearned Revenue and in other places.

Copy Rate by Day

You may, depending on rating setup, have your copy rates vary by day (for example, charge more for your larger Sunday paper than for other days of the week). This may be important in cases where the subscription is extended for things such as missed delivery. With a single copy rate, an extra day is simply added to the subscription period. So, if a subscriber misses the Sunday paper, it is very likely she will end up receiving an extra Wednesday paper or Monday paper. But if the copy rates vary by day, the subscriber can be credited appropriately for missed day. Perhaps Sunday costs 0.40 and the other days cost 0.20—so our subscriber will receive two extra papers during the week or an extra Sunday, depending on what days the subscription is extended.

The following examples illustrate how Circulation calculates the copy rate for a varying weekly rate and a varying monthly rate.

Imagine a rate “1week” was set up to vary by day, as follows:

Circulation would calculate a total of 1.63 for this weekly rate. If a subscriber with this rate made a payment of 20.00, he would be able to buy 12 weeks, and have 0.44 left over. Thus, an extra Sunday or two extra non-Sunday days could be added to the subscription.

Now imagine another rate, “3month”, is set up to vary by day. With monthly, quarterly, and yearly rates that vary by day, the days are weighted by percentages, rather than amounts. Let’s say the total period rate is 18.00, and the percentages are entered as:

Circulation would calculate the copy rate for each day using the following formula:

where “average aggregate days” is the average number of times each day of the week appears in the period, weighted by percentage. We get this figure by multiplying the number of times each day appears by the percentage for that day. So, if our example 3-month rate started October 7, 2005, the average aggregate days would be as follows:

So our copy rates would be: