Alliance for Audited Media

The Alliance for Audited Media (AAM) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1914 as the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Advertisers, led by the Association of National Advertising Managers (now the Association of National Advertisers), wanted a verified source of newspapers’ and magazines’ circulation rather than relying on the numbers disclosed by publishers. While early metrics established simple counts of paper copies of newspapers and magazines, now media companies and advertisers tabulate readership counts to include desktop, tablet, and smartphone audiences.

The Audit Bureau of Circulations established a tripartite audit model to collate and disseminate[Page 54] verifiable information for what is now a cross-channel data resource used by more than 4,000 North American media brands, publishers, advertisers, agencies, and technology vendors. On November 15, 2012, the Audit ...